Like Santa himself, turbulence appears in the blink of an eye and out of the blue. Unlike Santa, it leaves tears in its wake.  Getting knocked around the cabin during an otherwise ordinary flight is the leading cause of injuries for airline passengers, not to mention exceedingly frightening. Just ask any of the 192 people aboard Aerolineas Argentinas Flight 1303 from Miami to Buenos Aires in October. Fifteen of them were treated on arrival to Buenos Aires for injuries sustained during the bumpy flight. But just in time for the holidays, the International Air Transport Association is promising something nice; a turbulence reporting program that… Read More…

Seven years ago today, an Air France Airbus A330 failed to arrive in Paris after an overnight flight from Rio de Janeiro. Two hundred and twenty-eight people died. So it is a particularly poignant case of “the more things change the more they stay the same,” that the airline industry is still wrestling with the issues raised by that accident and revisited repeatedly since then. The loss of EgyptAir Flight 804 over the Mediterranean is the most recent re-ignition of the conversation. On May 20th, the Airbus A320 with 66 people on board appears to have crashed in the sea and the recorders have not… Read More…