News and notes from around the interweb:
- Reportedly American is rolling out a fix this weekend for customers losing premium seats they’ve paid for or are entitled to with their status when they swap a 160 seat Boeing 737 for an Oasis 172 seat plane.
- Delta’s incredible new award sale claims 200,000 miles roundtrip for Asia in business class is somehow good though in practice some awards do price lower than advertised.
- Korean Air SkyPass will eliminate stopovers on awards when traveling on Korean Air flights for travel July 1, 2020 onward. Since it’s Korean, we get advance notice! This doesn’t (yet?) appear to affect awards on partner airlines, which have to be booked roundtrip. And honestly Seoul – where most of their flights stop – isn’t at the top of my return list.
- Korean Air, Delta apologize for ejecting brothers from plane over peanut allergy
- Remembering the Tenerife Airport Disaster 42 Years Later. Former Starwood CEO Adam Aron, who once ran marketing for United and launched Hyatt’s program, was involved with the launch of Pan Am’s program. When he joined Pan Am, he shared with me that,
he was taken into a dark room and put in front of a screen where he was shown a two hour documentary on the runway collision of two Boeing 747s at Tenerife in 1977, known as the deadliest accident in aviation history. A KLM flight tried to take off while Pan Am’s 747 was on the runway. Everyone onboard the KLM 747 was killed, and 335 people onboard the Pan Am aircraft lost their lives.
As the video ended his colleague walked into the room, and told him that every decision at the airline matters. Lives are at stake. Don’t screw up.
- Why it’s so hard to pull the plug on Amtrak
The tenerife documentary should be required viewing at Boeing and FAA.
Don’t you think the snow -mo is more than a little bit dated?
@John – why? Neither the FAA or Boeing screwed up. They weren’t flying the plane, the pilots were.
The FAA screwed up by allowing Boeing too much latitude to regulate itself.
Boeing screwed up by never advising pilots of the new MCAS, claiming that the MAX and other 737s were virtually identical and very little training was required for transitioning pilots, and operating the MCAS system off of only one of the angle of attack indicators ignoring redundancy (having a back up if a part fails). Redundancy is probably the most important safety feature. The FAA also screwed up by ignoring reports from US pilots of the problems they had experienced with MCAS. The FAA screwed up by being the last regulatory body to ground the MAX even after there was compelling evidence (publicly reported large variations in vertical speed) that the Ethiopian crash occurred under similar circumstances to Lion Air. Planes, new or old, don’t just fall out of the sky. Grounding the plane would imply some error in certifying it in the first place. Boeing and the FAA may have been arrogant in assuming that pilot training in certain s-hole countries was to blame rather than a system they developed and approved.