As the coronavirus shows signs of subsiding, airline executives are making rosy promises that the business of air travel will soon rebound. These optimistic views must be seen for what they are; the best possible spin of what is in reality, an existential threat. Modern air travel has boomed based on a several decades-long marketing plan of enticing customers with cheap tickets and and a “why not?” sales pitch. Why not pop across the country to hear your favorite rock band? Why not hop on the red-eye for a morning sales call and be home in time for dinner? Why not escape a rainy weekend… Read More…

The pilots whose 2017 flight very nearly landed atop four loaded airliners waiting in line on a taxiway to take off from San Francisco International Airport, failed to manually tune the airplane’s navigation system for the landing. Had they done so, it may have helped them realize they were off the lateral track for the runway, according to investigators looking into the near disaster. Tuning the instrument landing system frequency was not a typical procedure for the Air Canada crews. This lapse was one but not the only factor that led the pilots of Flight 759 to get “dangerously close to other airplanes” so that at… Read More…

Warning to readers:  Photos of toilets appear in this post. Travelers at the airport hail from many countries and speak many languages but women arriving on oneworld flights into New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport have one word for the condition of the bathrooms in Terminal 8, “Ewwww.” Kisha Burgos stopped at the bathroom in the baggage claim area and was shocked to see paper-strewn floors, filthy toilets and empty and broken paper dispensers in the stalls. “It’s bad,” she told me comparing it to the airports she visited in Bangkok, Vietnam and Laos on her recent five-week trip. “Everything was really clean,” she said of the bathrooms in… Read More…