Category Archives for Airlines.
Rachel Starr Davis was fleeing a hurricane in Florida last week, connecting to American Airlines flight 5595 from Charlotte to Manchester, New Hampshire. Before pushback a flight attendant approached her and asked how old her son is.
The two year old boy wouldn’t wear a mask, despite in his mother’s words ‘begging, bribing, pleading’ but he screamed and cried as she “tried to hold him and put the mask on.”
In late May American Airlines CEO Doug Parker had a personal interaction with a Southwest Airlines flight attendant over race that went viral after he flew the airline and was carrying the book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism which had been recommended by a board member months earlier, but that he’d put aside distracted by the coronavirus crisis.
He and his wife continue that conversation.
American Airlines President Robert Isom spoke to a group of pilots last week. In his prepared remarks he laid out the carrier’s position on Black Lives Matter, as a way of framing controversy over the airline letting crewmembers wear Black Lives Matter pins.
Documenting just a handful of cases where inflight spread may have occurred is significant as an argument for the safety of flying because there’s never been a virus studied as extensively and intensively in a short period of time as this one. There are millions of people flying throughout the world week after week during the global pandemic, yet we haven’t been able to identify more flights where the virus spread (though there are probably some). This – combined with airline cabin crew having a lower incidence of Covid-19 than the general population, is highly suggestive that inflight spread is very rare.
Airlines have somehow conned the President, the Speaker of the House and myriad members of the House of Representatives and the Senate to sign onto the idea of a $25 billion ‘clean extension’ of CARES Act payroll support. That’s a second $25 billion injection of cash in exchange for not furloughing workers or eliminating service to most cities through March 31, 2021.
Except that the math here is truly insane. No one seems to be doing the math. So let’s talk about what a $2.5 billion package might look like instead.
A passenger and flight attendant on Spirit Airlines got into an argument over whether the passenger’s mask constituted a ‘mask’. The flight attendant offered the passenger a ‘real mask’- instead of an American flag gaiter – which they refused to wear. Police were contacted to meet the plane.
The most 2020 thing ever is a debate over what the word ‘mask’ means on a commercial aircraft.
Kosher Arabia should be up and running in January, and will serve Emirates as well as other airlines operating from Dubai. The Dubai-based carrier will no longer have to use a contract caterer to source Kosher meals. Emirates is even exploring opening Kosher restaurants both in Dubai and throughout the region.
For anyone not dedicated to the destruction of Israel, I think, this seems unambiguously a good thing – at least as long as Emirates doesn’t displace some of its fine wines with Manischewitz.
You wouldn’t buy the basic economy tickets airlines were selling, but they’re going to take your money anyway.
President Trump’s Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross said on Friday that not giving airlines another $25 billion, after providing $25 billion in payroll support and another $25 billion in subsidized loans, is akin to punishing them:
British Airways has a new business class suite with privacy doors. It appears on the same plane where first class still lacks doors. That will be (slowly) changing as British Airways will have a new first class suite with doors, which will first appear on new Boeing 777s that start to be delivered next month.
Politicians from both sides of the aisle, along with the President, have publicly supported a second airline bailout in the form of a ‘clean extension of CARES Act payroll support.’ That would mean another $25 billion over 6 months to the airlines in exchange for holding off on employee furloughs.
However this hasn’t happened because it’s caught up in negotiations over a larger package, that some observers say is now unlikely to happen. Since furlough restrictions expire after September 30, some airlines are expected to let go of workers starting October 1. That’s seen as a deadline for Congress to act (or for the President to take some form of executive action, as he’s suggested he could).
October 1 isn’t really a hard deadline, though.
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 »
