Category Archives for Airports.
Air traffic control in Nashville turned a Southwest jet that was going around after an aborted landing directly into the departure path of another Southwest flight, triggering collision warnings in both cockpits. The two aircraft came within about 500 feet vertically before the crews and onboard systems avoided a far more serious outcome.
A pilot in Palm Beach County has sued to stop Florida from renaming Palm Beach International Airport for President Trump, arguing the state has no business forcing a local airport to rebrand itself for political reasons. The case is a long shot, focused on how far the state can go in commandeering a local public asset for symbolic politics.
A court ruling has put real limits on how far TSA can go in changing airport screening without going through formal rulemaking. If the agency wants to bring back shoe removal, make facial recognition mandatory, or impose other broad new checkpoint rules, it may no longer be enough to do it quietly through internal procedures and nonpublic directives.
Airport pickups are not really about transportation, they are about whether you treat a small inconvenience as a burden or as part of caring for someone you love. That is why one husband calling a 30-minute drive for his wife a massive inconvenience touched off a much bigger argument about marriage, effort, and whether love is supposed to be efficient.
You can’t bring this knife through security and bring it on an airplane – but you can be given this knife on an airplane. Make it make sense! This passenger is wrong to blame this on TSA, though, let alone take it out on the front line screener who isn’t expected to ponder the existential nature of the role. Congress did it!
American Airlines is installing electronic boarding gates at new DFW gates and pitching them as a way to make boarding smoother, more consistent, and less congested. But these turnstiles do not solve the real causes of boarding delays—and they may leave passengers with less flexibility, less human help, and one more point of failure between the gate and the aircraft.
Airports say concessionaires cannot simply raise listed prices, so instead travelers get hit with a growing list of surcharges that do the same thing more opaquely. The result is a strange bit of airport economics: prices look artificially lower than they really are, wage and benefit costs get broken out as separate fees, and workers may not even come out ahead because those extra charges can reduce what customers leave as tips.
A woman dressed in heavy jewelry and jeweled hair joked that she was TSA’s worst nightmare, then found out what that actually looks like: three scans, a pat down, and extra scrutiny at the checkpoint.
Delta and JetBlue have quietly begun charging passengers to check bags curbside at some airports, turning what used to be a convenience into yet another fee. The change looks small at $3.50, but it is part of a bigger shift: outsourcing a once-premium service, lowering labor costs, and monetizing the airport curb instead of treating it as part of the ticket.
The new DHS secretary says the administration is “looking at” pulling Customs and Border Protection officers from airports in sanctuary cities, which would shut those airports off from international arrivals. The idea is absurd by the standards of the administration’s own policy goals. Many of the airports are not even in the cities being targeted, and cutting off major hubs like JFK, LAX, or O’Hare would ripple far beyond red-blue politics into the entire U.S. air travel system and economy.
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 »
