Category Archives for Airports.
Apparently it’s a “travel trend” to enjoy a cocktail at the airport that you haven’t purchased – mix your own drinks before getting on the flight. Here’s one creator’s take on the do-it-yourself airport espresso martini, which involves mixing your own booze with Starbucks.
Hong Kong’s airport is going to more than sextuple the size of its gold vault.
On Monday, JetBlue flight 811 from Boston to Chicago O’Hare ingested something into its engine at O’Hare airport’s exact same intersection where the American Airlines incident happened last week.
The Department of Transportation has made its determination about the five new “beyond perimeter” routes that would be permitted to operated at Washington’s National airport. These are flights provided for in the FAA Reauthorization Act which are farther the airport’s current cap for most flights of 1,250 miles. The decision was made months after the agency was statutorily required to announce it.
In the legislative fight over five-year reauthorization for the FAA, airlines and other interests had a Christmas tree of of wish lists items they worked hard to get. It’s a $105 billion bill that more than doubles subsidies for small community air service, and makes it harder to track private planes belonging to wealthy individuals. Among many other things, in a victory for Delta over United (which operates a competing hub at Washington Dulles airport) it included 5 new “beyond-perimeter” slot pairs at Washington National airport, that permit flights farther than 1,250 miles. The authors of the bill didn’t just say there could be more flying, and to destinations currently reserved for Dulles airport, they outlined who should get those flights. They had to go to existing big airlines, and couldn’t be given to new…
Federal air marshals have gotten together and they want out of the TSA. They want to be real police, and as long as the air marshal service is part of that agency they “feel like they are not performing law enforcement duties.” Instead, they want to be a standalone law enforcement agency with the Department of Homeland Security or, if need be, the Department of Transportation.
For the most part, airport departure boards in the U.S. list flights alphabetically by destination. This makes sense. It makes it easy to find your flight, whether or not it’s on time, and what gate it’s leaving from.
In much of the rest of the world, it does not work like this. Departures boards are organized by departure time. You have to know your exact departure time to the minute in order to find your flight.
If you’re flying to Sydney, you get off the plane, and you see this sign you’re going to check your glasses – are you seeing correctly?
Lebanon’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation has banned passengers departing from Beirut from traveling with walkie talkies and pagers – either with them into the cabin, or in checked luggage. I fully expect calls to broaden the ban put in place by Lebanon – to electronics broadly, and even wifi, out of fear that a connected device could be ordered to detonate.
Surprising absolutely no readers of this website, the March 2025 REAL ID deadline isn’t going to happen. The first enforcement deadline, by the way, was in 2008.
Under a new proposed rule – that has not been finalized, even – full enforcement might not begin until May 2027. In the meantime, the plan is to hand a piece of paper to passengers whose IDs don’t meet the standards laid out in the 2005 Real ID Act telling them to get a new one.
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 »
