Flight Blog
News and Tips about Air Travel, Business / Industry, Flying, Airplanes, and other fun

From TechCrunch:

Purchasing flights purely based on price has been around for a while, but the consumer has never had the power to quickly and at a glance evaluate the cheapest days to fly nor the cheapest destinations to fly to. Flyspy reverse engineers some of the mystique associated with the airline industry and makes it extremely transparent.

The way it works is that I give it a departure city and a destination city and optionally a departure date and length of stay. The search result, which returns very quickly, will present me with a graph of flight prices over the next 30 days so that I can quickly look at which days are the cheapest to fly. To book a flight I just click on the point in the graph. Simple.

Looks awesome. Check out the alpha site here (only works for Minneapolis-bound flights to select destinations), and read TechCrunch’s breakdown of FlySpy here.

» ATA Airlines ditches SFO for Oakland
They also increase flights to LAX, plan a new route from Ontario and Hawaii.

» JetBlue launches more flights to heartland
JetBlue will also start non-stops to Richmond, Virginia, at the end of March.

This is interesting because it’s the airlines thinking about doing it themselves (unlike private companies, like in the United States). Lost-luggage compensation costs in Europe are about to mushroom with the introduction of new laws that triple the potential “refund” for lost luggage (to 1,200 euros). This makes RFID tags on held luggage is an attractive solution, basically because data stored electronically is harder to mess up.

» Read the article: Airlines eye up RFID tagging

» Related Post: Reduce your chance of lost luggage

But it’s still good information to know. The Environmental Protection Agency studied the drinking water in airplanes and this is what they found:

Dangerous levels of bacteria have been found in drinking water aboard 15% of planes at US airports

However,

Twenty-four US airlines have now agreed to routinely disinfect their water supplies and monitor water quality in response to the EPA study. “Passengers must feel confident of the water safety on an airplane,” says Grant Nakayama of the EPA. “These new protocols will provide protection.”

All is good in the world again. Phew.

» Read the full article

This piece of news lands right in the heart of awesome … my only worry is will soaring gas prices kill this sport? Heck no, this is America. It’s NASCAR in the sky, it’s rocket racing. The exhibition event launches October of next year, and they say the sport league will start for reals in [...]

BBC delves into this — I think it’s a valid issue … most of the things we’re most afraid of aren’t because they happen a lot, it’s because they’re scary. You’re hundreds of times more likely to die driving a car in the U.S. than you are in a plane, but people don’t care about stuff like that.

Read the article

What’s going on? (link to CNN article)

If you want all the plane crash information you can handle, head on over to Plane Crash Info and they will hook you up real nice.

Hey, in case you didn’t know, Flight Club is an online community for air travelers. Flight Club (the parent of this blog) has online tools that help members meet other members on airplanes and in airports — basically, we’re fun people that make travel more exciting. Business travelers, recreational travelers, if you fly for fun or for work, if you fly just once a year, Flight Club has a spot for you.

Membership is booming, so if you haven’t thought about joining before, then now is a good time. Registration takes about a minute and you can do it at this page. It’s free, it’s a fun site, uh huh oh yeah.

A deep dark cloud rained bad news on the airline industry this week. Note: I link to CNN stories here because they don’t go into archive and don’t get deleted after two weeks. To recap:

• More than a hundred thousand passengers get stranded at Heathrow after a British Airways strike (article)
• The New York Times reports that airport delays are at the worst since 2000 (article)
• Airplane fuel is now an issue, prompting the majors to raise fares and raising the possibility of big problems on the tarmac (article, article)
• Delta and Independence Air share more bad news about potential bankruptcy (article, article)
• CNN investigates U.S. airport security for three months and finds lots of problems, then decides to pile on and release the news this week (swell move, guys) (article)

Hope this week is better, people.

Sunday Update: Plane crashes in Greece, killing all 128 on board (article). Not a good start for the week.

Virgin Galactic launches space tourism: Commercial flights into outer space start in 2008. It will cost $200,000 for the trip, which includes five minutes of weightlessness (that’s $40,000 per minute). Lots of people are interested in going up (no joke). Interesting bits in the article on the topic:

• Only 450 humans have been in outer space
• 4000 pilots applied for the 75 jobs available to steer the space craft. Oh man would that not be the sweetest job on the planet? “By day, I pilot space craft. By night … “