Air Travel News 2.15.11

Air Travel News, Love on the Road — By Nancy Y on February 15, 2011 at 6:00 am

by Nancy Yeomans

LG Air Travel News Editor

Look up in the sky! It’s a bird….it’s a plane! No….it’s your weekly air travel news! Here’s what’s happening in the world of aviation, from the ground up.

Flirting + Flying = Flyrting

It was yesterday but we’re still channelling the spirit of St. Valentine. Seems that the airport bar is just a pre-cursor to the real action. A survey shows that 45% of airline passengers admitted to harmless flirting while in-flight. A whopping 95% have aspirations to join the mile-high club! Bottom line: a flight is a relatively safe venue to practice your enticement techniques. Source: Skyscanner

Frequent Flying – Good News and Bad News

A couple of the big airlines are touting their ‘new’ frequent flyer award booking systems, however there doesn’t seem to be any real benefit to them for us, the passengers. It’s a bit easier to see which flights have award seats available, but here are just a couple of the drawbacks: a) they’re often not flights going to anywhere you want to go and b) in United’s case they’re only available from certain cities. If you’re originating your travel from any other city you’re basically out of luck. Source: ChicagoTribune

Perks For Purchase

For most of us, the usual class of travel is economy. On a short flight, it really doesn’t make that much difference as long as you don’t happen to be 7 feet tall. Several airlines are planning to implement new airline seating on their aircraft. These seats will offer more width and length to your personal space as well as more recline capability. Their target market is the business traveler, but, say, on a 14 hour flight to Australia one might be sorely tempted to upgrade… Source: LATimes

Rats!

Eww! I guess it’s not all that surprising, but we still don’t want to see them! An Alaska Airlines flight from Seattle to Denver had to return to the gate recently because there was an unwanted stowaway. A passenger reported seeing a rat scampering around the cabin. The airline acted quickly by taking the aircraft out of service and calling in an exterminator. Surely the rodent wasn’t there for the in-flight meal? It would have been sorely disappointed… Source: AOL

More Errors, Or New Reporting System?

The aviation community is all abuzz this week about newly released data that states that errors in the air traffic control system doubled over the past year. Since it is a government agency we’re talking about, there is much confusion about the reporting system and whether the statistics are accurate. I do have a bit of personal insight into this topic, so want to put any nervous thoughts at bay…there are many, many checks and balances within the system. Sure, air traffic controllers make mistakes…we’re only human. But the controllers in charge of your flights are completely dedicated to the safety of the flying public and do their best to ensure that we here in the US have the safest air traffic control system in the world. Source: USAToday

Quickies

New Routes

New airline routes announced this week by Delta, JetBlue, Qatar, Air Canada and Strategic Source: Jaunted

Photo credit: Zack Akukumba, Augapfel/flickr