Contending for eww story of the month, and certainly a contender with this event in Sharjah for  the 2012 “say WHAT?” award, an air traveler on an Avianca flight from Bogota to Barcelona was arrested for smuggling approximately 3 pounds of cocaine implanted in her breasts. News reports say the 28-year old Panamanian woman attracted the interest of customs officials on Tuesday when she gave conflicting answers to routine questions about the purpose of her trip. A law enforcement spokeswoman said the passenger was wearing blood soaked bandages and reported to the agents that she’d undergone cosmetic implant surgery. The woman was taken to a… Read More…

UPDATE: Babbitt resigns at 5:00pm EST Excerpt from his statement “I am unwilling to let anything cast a shadow on the outstanding work done 24 hours a day, 7 days a week by my colleagues at the FAA.  They run the finest and safest aviation system in the world and I am grateful that I had the opportunity to work alongside them.”  . Assorted notes on the latest round of breaking news on the aviation beat. Where to start? Okay, Randy Babbitt. What is there really to say besides bemoan the tragedy that his arrest in Virginia on Saturday for driving under the influence of… Read More…

Airlines are making billions from the baggage fees they started charging in 2005. In the last four years, they’ve raked in some $6 billion as I reported in The New York Times this spring. Now comes Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana with a plan that will mandate that airlines include one checked bag in the price of a ticket. The senator recognizes that there is a problem. Her solution, however is all wrong. While airlines are raking in money by the suitcase-full, they are sloughing off on passengers and the Transportation Security Administration, the burdensome consequences of bag fees. The TSA estimates checkpoint workers are… Read More…

You may have heard the joke about the airline pilot who goes to hell only to find on arrival that rather than an eternity suffering fire and brimstone, his hell will be spent doing endless walk-arounds in blizzard conditions. (That’s not the punch line, but this is a family blog, and I can’t print the rest of it. Ask Jim Hall or see me later.) Another version of pilot hell might be something like what happened to the captain of a Chautauqua  Airlines/Delta Connection flight earlier this week en route from Ashville, North Carolina to New York. The poor pilot just wanted a quick “biological break”… Read More…

One never knows when a good story will result in a tip that leads to another and this week I’ve had a double dose.  After writing on my travel blog GO HOW about how arbitrary the decisionmaking can be when it comes to removing passengers from airplanes, I received accounts from three separate sources that just baffle me. Saying that his recent removal from a Finnair flight was embarrassing (I have no doubt) business class passenger – let’s call him Hannu – had to purchase another ticket and was not reimbursed for his original fare of €2800. I wasn’t there and I don’t know Hannu,… Read More…

My sons, Antonio, Sam and Joseph in 2001 Through the window of the room my three sons shared in 2001, they could lie in bed and watch airplanes on approach to New York City’s many airports. A few days after September 11, my youngest son, Joseph, then seven, asked me to close the blind. He was worried that the planes would fly through the window. It saddened me that airplanes would become a source of fear to my children but as far as aviation is concerned this is the legacy of September 11. A list of all the ways that air travel has changed since… Read More…

There’s a world of difference between how much trust the citizens of various nations have in their government. This is particularly obvious here in New Zealand where, while listening to a radio news show recently, I marveled as caller after caller expressed confidence in their government’s ability to properly handle the crisis in earthquake-riddled Christchurch. To an American it sounds downright quaint, but on second thought, I’m envious. Now comes John Pistole, top dog at the US Transportation Security Administration, promising that he’ll grant the aviation industry its biggest wish and start assessing travelers by the risk they really, truly, pose using a Trusted Traveler… Read More…

UPDATE April 20, 2011: Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood tells Gwen Ifill of PBS NewsHour, that the air traffic controller discussed below has been fired. LaHood: Where the controller had guided a 737 Southwest flight to take a look at a small plane that was out of radio contact to see if something was going on. Completely violates procedures. You can’t guide a big plane over to look at a small plane. That’s not the way that’s done.” The air traffic control profession just can’t get a break and this was supposed to be such a happy time for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association…. Read More…

> Much is being said today about the elevated temperature of discourse in American politics in light of the apparent attempted assassination of newly elected Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords on Saturday. Readers of Flying Lessons may remember that I’ve been writing, writing, and writing some more about how the increasingly hostile us-versus-them tone has seeped into aviation. In a nine-minute lecture on MSNBC, commentator Keith Olbermann waxed with a fury on the subject of the shooting, including quoting the Pima County Sheriff investigating the mass slayings at a Tucson shopping center as attributing the violence in part to the “black cloud of violence that has… Read More…

Photo on N688AA by Marlo Plate on Airliners.Net Can American Airlines get a break? Not this week. Today at noon, American Airlines Flight 2253 ran off the runway while landing at Jackson Hole, Wyoming. No one on board was hurt and the NTSB is investigating. Trust me, these days, you don’t want to be American Airlines. Between this flight,  and American pilot Chris Liu‘s coming out as the producer and narrator of a You Tube video calling aviation security at San Francisco Airport “a farce”, one might think the beleaguered Dallas-based company had its share of bad publicity, but that would fail to mention yesterday’s… Read More…