Category Archives for Airports.
Back in May the process for entering Hong Kong was one of the most excruciating things I’ve seen in travel, taking the better part of a day. It involved being bused to the EXPO Center, long waits for testing and results, and receiving a monitoring bracelet.
While transit has opened up in some cases, the process for actually entering Hong Kong is still stringent – but has been substantially streamlined.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington named the late John Murtha one of the most corrupt members of Congress, in part for earmarking government money for campaign contributors. His legacy, though, is the John Murtha Johnstown–Cambria County Airport, the ‘airport for no one’ which – before the Covid-19 pandemic – saw an average of 17 passengers per day.
The airport wants to kick out the incumbent airline and bring in SkyWest – which promises 50 seat regional jets to Chicago and Washington, DC.
Around 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday evening a woman approached TSA screening at Pittsburgh airport, through water on a TSA employee when asked for her ID, and then ran through the checkpoint.
Police rushed her and subdued her. She broke free, “started fighting with them and ran for the airport train” but was detained again.
A 24 year old man crashed his car through a perimeter gate at the Portland airport on Sunday. His wife and two children were in the vehicle with him. He told police they were being chased by trucks, and wound up on the airport grounds as an evasive maneuver.
Then the man took off, with one of his kids in tow, and drove underneath the wing of a taxiing commercial flight. There’s video of the arrest.
Amazon Air says there “is no threat to our associates and Amazon Air operations have not been disrupted” by the live missile.
Whenever I fly through or out of LAX I run into celebrities. And the thing is there must be more of them than I realize, because I don’t know who most people that are conventionally famous even are. I’ve run into Billy Crystal at TSA screening and then the terminal 4 Admirals Club, Reba McEntire in the Admirals Club too, and Randy Jackson escorting a child star in first class across the aisle to name just a few.
Airline employees, either more culturally aware than I am or just with access to a flight manifest, must find this an every day occurrence. So a Los Angeles-based airline customer service agent with a Tik Tok account is a dangerous thing when she decides to dish on the celebrities she’s met at the airport.
Under the system the TSA is contemplating, a private contractor would develop an app to ask the traveler challenge questions based on both government and commercial data about the person. It would then produce a pass/fail to be shown at the TSA checkpoint.
After all the scare stories, Customs and Border Protection acknowledged “most of the fake IDs were for college-age students.” Isn’t the biggest risk then that someone could be tasked with buying booze for a non-socially distanced rager as colleges open this fall?
Over $2 billion has been seized from travelers at U.S. airports by the federal government between 2000 and 2016. 70% of 30,500 people whose money was seized were never charged with any crime. 25% of money is seized at Washington Dulles airport.
Airlines say if the government turns someone away for a fever, they’ll refund the customer’s ticket. Making someone with a fever show up at the airport potentially infecting others in order to qualify for a refund seems like a really dumb idea.
Some scientists say smell tests could be a better approach..
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 »
