Woman’s Inflight Romance Live Tweeted, Now She’s Bitter and Cabinet Secretary’s Spend Flying Private

by Gary Leff

News and notes from around the interweb:

  • American Airlines employee fired for giving her buddy passes to another employee on leave who needed to visit her husband, a corrections officer who was shot in the head while aiding another officer shot by a gunman. The fired employee says she wasn’t aware of the rule.

  • New Zealand’s acting Prime Minister (their Prime Minister is on maternity leave) is very unhappy that Air New Zealand is serving a burger onboard without meat instead of showcasing New Zealand lamb or steak. Air New Zealand was re-nationalized in 2001. The government provided subsidies to the airline, and still owns 52% of the carrier.

    United has a revenue-sharing anti-trust immunized joint venture with Air New Zealand, and never lodged a complaint about the New Zealand government’s ownership or subsidies — despite an Open Skies agreement between the US and New Zealand. Things that make you go hmmm…

  • A week and a half ago two people finding love on an aircraft was live-tweeted. It gained the hashtag #planebae and what was remarkable about the situation was the correspondent watching ‘calling the shot’ predicting the hookup in advance like Babe Ruth pointing towards center field and calling his home run shot in the 1932 World Series.

    Now the woman at the center of the story is lashing out about “a digital-age cautionary tale about privacy, identity, ethics and consent.”

  • The bill for former Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price’s charter flights

    The report also revealed that 20 of the 21 trips Price took that the agency looked into “did not comply with Federal requirements.” Those 21 trips cost the federal government nearly $1.2 million, including more than $480,000 for chartered flights and an additional $700,000 for travel on military planes.

  • China’s HNA Group is unable to pay for Airbus planes it’s ordered while dealing with over $90 billion in debt ($5 billion in interest payments last year) and subsidiary airlines “such as Hainan, Lucky Air, and Beijing Capital Airlines had missed payments” on aircraft leases.

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. Wow… calling the woman “bitter”? That language seems a bit dismissive and harsh.. Just putting it out there for you and your readers to consider. flame away!

  2. Funny how you were never concerned about the Obama administration’s jetsetting ways. Remember Loretta Lynch and her tarmac meeting in her private jet with slick willy, while his wife was subject of an FBI investigation?

    Quit posting about your leftist propaganda and stick to actual travel news and analysis. Every time I see one of these political posts, I leave a comment such as this, then swear off your blog for a week.

  3. WR – stop being defensive and a moron. This site isn’t called whataboutism.com

  4. Do you think WR might be a Republican?

    And, yes, it’s probably true that no matter what Trump might do 30% of American voters and WR will be in his corner.

  6. Gary – have to agree with Andrew, framing the woman as being “bitter” and “lashing out” is incredibly dismissive and even a but sexist. She had her privacy clearly invaded and it’s lead to relentless harassment of her and speculation about her sexuality, promiscuity, etc (but of course none of the same for the man involved in the story). Criticizing her and painting her as unreasonable for reacting to that is just wrong.

  7. Title is not only “harsh,” but inaccurate. It makes it sound like she wanted the attention from the beginning and changed her mind.

  8. Not only did you republish the tweets and video of this woman’s encounter to your audience, now you are republishing a story about this woman again and somehow suggesting in your title that there was an inflight romance (she apparently is denying the way the comedian was trying to spin it) and two you are suggesting that NOW she is bitter like she somehow consented to having her privacy violated in the first place and only later changed her mind. Not sure how any of this is relevant to a travel blog, but its pretty sad that you didn’t see the problem with posting the first article and violating her privacy all in the name of getting clicks.

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