News and notes from around the interweb:
- The mysterious concrete arrows across the United States that used to be for pilot navigation and were built in the 1920 and early 1930s. (HT: Tommy L)
- Woman stole a car for two weeks, thinking it was her rental
Avis, Miami Airport - Ruh roh: FAA inspector developed a close relationship with an American Airlines manager, and ignored safety tip.
A federal inspector assigned to monitor American Airlines Group Inc. failed to act on safety complaints after developing a friendship with a company official, according to a government watchdog report.
The Federal Aviation Administration inspector, who had been assigned to the carrier for 28 years and had taken an overseas trip with an airline manager, didn’t address what was later shown to be a legitimate tip about how the carrier assured aircraft were safe following maintenance work, the report said.
- Passenger earned 172,000 American AAdvantage miles on a single roundtrip
- Marriott is working with Alibaba to test facial recognition check-in in Sanya and Hangzhou, China. Airlines are working on this, and collaborating with government, to share data and use it both for security and commercially. I find it creepy and dangerous but reality seems to be passing me by on this one. And of course I didn’t object a decade ago when the W Seoul photographed me at check-in the first time I stayed there. (HT: Hans Mast)
- Wall Street Journal spread on the Emirates inflight product too much conflating of first and business class, and a failure to recognize that Emirates’ business class hard product is largely inferior to competitors and will remain so.
Emirates A380 Business Class Bar - Now that American Express Plenti is toast ExxonMobil is launching their own rewards program
Doesn’t surprise me
The CEO has always been about profits and ego over people
He is the ultimate greed monger.”lock him up”
He would risk lives for a wooden nickel
And his stinginess doesn’t stop with award availability and a criminal lack of customer service
But added to all that now safety concerns
I’m so glad I moved my business elsewhere 100% as of this year
The concrete arrows story is an old one:
https://www.citylab.com/life/2015/02/why-is-america-dotted-with-giant-concrete-arrows/385472/
Back in the days of US Airways, there was a Get Out More promotion (called GOM) where there were multiple 2x mile codes and you were able to stack them due to their poor IT. For several months flyers were getting 5x or 6x on all flights and they were status miles as well as redeemable miles. I had a friend who did one round-trip, received over 50,000 miles and was up gold. Some people earned an incredible amount of miles over that time (think 7 figures), especially the ones who did weekly cross country commutes.