Air Travel News 5.01.12

Air, Air Travel News, Wifi & Internet Cafes — By Nancy Y on May 1, 2012 at 6:00 am

by Nancy Yeomans

LG Air Travel 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.

13 Million $$ CEO

It sure pays to merge. The CEO of United Airlines’ 2011 paycheck was in the neighborhood of 13.4 million dollars. Not bad for a year’s work! Much of this number comes from stock options, but his annual salary alone is listed at $975,000. The United/Continental merger was apparently lucrative as were various cost-cutting measures put in place by the airline. I guess we know where our checked bag fees are going. Source: The Washington Post

Wi-Fi In The Sky

While the availability of wi-fi is usually a given, it’s not always given gratis. Many major airports offer the service, but several of them do not and have no plans to. That’s a minor inconvenience to us travelers who usually have some time to kill while waiting for our flights. With the demand from passengers going nowhere but up, there may be other options on the horizon. Source: SeattlePI

TSA On The Take

In a case of the fox guarding the hen house, 2 current and 2 former TSA officials at LAX have been charged with drug trafficking and bribery. The screeners are accused of taking large bribery payments to basically look the other way when the packages of drugs came through their security line at the airport. And these are the people trusted with keeping the aircraft safe, not to mention checking us out in the body scanners. The charges against them could result in life in prison. Source: USAToday

Monkeypox, Maybe?

In what appears to have been a mis-diagnosis, passengers on a flight arriving at Chicago’s Midway airport were detained on Friday. One of the passengers on the Detroit to Chicago flight was suspected of having been exposed to monkeypox while in Uganda tending to adoption details. The CDC sent a health crew to meet her flight and the all the occupants of the aircraft were held on board for 3 hours while they investigated. The passenger in question was eventually given a clean bill of health. Source: Chicago Tribune

New Routes

This week’s new routes are courtesy of Air Berlin, All Nippon Airways, CityJet, JetBlue and Volaris Airlines. Source: Jaunted

Photo credit: kevin dooley, epSos.de/flickr