Category Archives for Airports.
On October 31st Trevor Noah asked Hillary Clinton how she killed Jeffrey Epstein. Then on Tuesday the San Diego airport decided to throw down its own gauntlet on the matter, using the airport’s paging system to announce an Epstein Coverup.
At Amsterdam Schiphol today the airport’s D concourse was cordoned off, and passengers and crew were evacuated from aircraft. Emergency vehicles were out on the tarmac.
The emergency turned out to simply be a false alarm triggered by an Air Europa flight.
TSA sceeners have maintained a private Facebook group for years, where about a third of the agency’s employees are members, as a as a home for mocking passengers with racist tropes and homophobic rants.
The page is called “TSA Breakroom,” it’s limited to agency employees, and there are 18,000 members.
In 2013 Atlanta got the first P.F. Chang’s in an airport, upstairs on the A concourse. That P.F. Chang’s has set a new milestone. It’s where Bill Murray wanted to work.
Appearing on Amy Shumer’s pdcast he talked about “his desire to work at the [P.F. Chang’s] dining chain.” It’s the “one job he’d like to do outside of acting” and he shared that he “fill[ed] out an application at P.F. Chang’s at the Atlanta airport, because I think that’s one of the great places.”
TSA has one job: to keep dangerous items outside of security checkpoints. That alone doesn’t make us safe, as Brussels and Istanbul airport attacks before security screening made clear. And the TSA isn’t very good at it in any case, regularly missing 90% or more of dangerous items they screen.
At a minimum, though, you’d expect that the TSA itself wouldn’t be the one bringing guns in.
The City of Houston had a hiring freeze – no new police, first responders in the event of floods – but managed to create a new $95,000 a year internship for someone the Mayor has “a past working relationship” with, after initially claiming to have no idea who the intern was. The position allows the candidate to decide for themselves whether to stay on at the conclusion of the 12- to 18-month internship.
Curiously, the $95,000 internship isn’t at George Bush International Airport (IAH) or Houston Hobby (HOU) but at general aviation Houston Municipal Airport.
This is some skilled driving – on the part of the catering truck driver and the guy who intervenes with a tug.
This Chicago O’Hare ramp worker driving in circles is Michael Douglas in Falling Down. He is all of us, in these crazy times. The real hero shows up about 27 seconds in to put a stop to the whole thing.
A man running a gold smuggling ring out of Singapore has pled guilty to corruption after airline check-in counter staff flipped on the operation. Apparently he wasn’t just shipping his gold as checked luggage, he was too cheap to pay the excess baggage fees and bribed counter staff to understate the weight of the bags on Tigerair flights to Chennai.
If he had been willing to pay for his checked bags, he might not have been caught.
Dubai International Airport has launched a new “TaxiDXB” service making “hailing a taxi” possible inside the terminal. So far offered just in Concourse B, the airport plans to expand this “to other concourses in the coming months.”
Did you realize that all of your airport movements are being captured on video? At most airports all public spaces are being recorded. Those recordings aren’t just used for security either. Airlines have access to them. Whenever a story about bad passengers comes out, or airlines acting badly towards passengers, there’s video and airlines review it to see what really happened and potentially defend themselves.
The quality of video is surprisingly high in some airports around the world.
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 »
