News and notes from around the interweb:
- Creative neighborhood strategy in Houston for chasing out Airbnbs
- State of Tennessee moves process forward to take over Nashville airport but the FAA doesn’t like it.
Tennessee leaders are flush with surplus budget revenues and have a two-fold plan to invest in and expand BNA, one of the state’s top-performing assets, as well as entice growth at all airports.
Another bill moving swiftly through the legislature would reduce a jet-fuel-tax cap, or limit, on airlines who want to expand local service. The airline incentive could spur even more growth at Tennessee airports by making them more competitive with border states that offer the tax break.
- The Air New Zealand bunk bed (WaPo)
- American Airlines outgoing Chairman’s tour, Down Under edition.
- Taiwan’s new premium airline, Starlux, will partner with Alaska Airlines. Hopefully that’ll mean Mileage Plan redemption opportunities – and not at the insane rates we’ve often seen as Alaska adds partners.
STARLUX Airlines expansion plans:
– Partnership with Alaska Airlines for connectivity in Los Angeles and other future destinations
– Launching flights to San Francisco and New York City depending on aircraft deliveries
– Oneworld Alliance? pic.twitter.com/PPnLRStft8
— Ishrion Aviation (@IshrionA) April 13, 2023
- Fluent English speaker complains that only two of three Air Canada flight attendants spoke French. He claims the airline told him if he wanted to be served in business class in French, he could take another flight – and that ground staff in Quebec told him the same thing. That’s… highly unlikely. He seemed to be looking to leverage local laws around providing service in French for attention, and to complain that Air Canada’s CEO is highly paid while not himself speaking French. Oh, Canada.
- Alaska Airlines Visa cardmembers earn 1000 qualifying miles per $5000 spent Registration required, May 1 – November 30. (HT: Frequent Flyer Bonuses)
@gary: Firewall
Ugh, must you frequently link to pay walls?
Weird there didn’t seem to be one when i clicked, maybe because I’m currently outside North America?
Interesting how legislators who campaign on smaller government are the first ones to try an take over an asset that has the potential to be a cash cow.
Flew into BNA a couple of months ago. The changes are moving the airport in the right direction. Would love to see UA build a hub there to fill in their coverage gap in the SE US. I know…wishful thinking.
Clickbait headline! Like I’m going to pay to subscribe to The Tennessean!
One day, I (a French as a poorly spoken second language American) might travel on AC from Edmonton to Yellowknife and see what kind of a snit I can gin up if no FA on that route speaks French.
Here’s a non-paywalled story about the BNA takeover: https://wpln.org/post/republican-lawmakers-continue-infiltration-of-nashvilles-government-operations/
Not surprisingly, it’s another story of a Republican State legislature punishing a Democratic city in a red state.
jfhscott, Even if they did speak French, is unlikely you will be able to understand each other, as you likely knew France French as opposed to Quebec French. We had a French foreign exchange student, who could barely understand a native Canadian French speaker.
For many years, I had a dislike for the French. Then, I finally went to France and found the people there to be quite nice, friendly, and welcoming. It struck me: decades of this prejudice had it roots in my dealings with Quebeckers. It’s not the French who are awful, it’s French Canadians! My visits to the province have taught me that it is absolutely dictatorial about “their” language. And I used quotes because French, isn’t actually just *their* language, but then again they don’t actually speak French as French people do – they speak Quebecois. And they are absolutely obnoxious about it.
In France, STOP signs say “STOP”. In Quebec this is literally illegal, they have to say Arret and are only permitted to say as much. If you don’t understand a word of French, TFB for you. Just one example of their attitude problem. And, I’m sure some pro-Quebec person will come at me – and I couldn’t care less. You’re in an English speaking country, deal with it. You want parity? Provide it in your own province.
So, this story doesn’t surprise me in the least. They live in a bilingual country, but if you speak only English, they pretend that you’re in a French province and nobody speaks English. Which is ironic, because a lot of (real) French people do. And they can too.
Yeah, The Tennessean is unfortunately owned by Gannett (same company that owns USA Today and a bunch of local newspapers across the country,) which unfortunately loves paywalls. I hope their revenue drops until they realize they need to fire the leadership that made this decision and switch to an online media model that actually works in the 21st century.
As for the actual story, the State of Tennessee provides funding for the Nashville Airport. The city of Nashville does not. The vast majority of people who use the Nashville Airport do not live in Nashville. Regardless of party affiliation, it makes no sense for the city of Nashville to have exclusive control over it when it’s funded by taxpayers statewide and is the primary passenger service airport for somewhere in the ballpark of 3 million people, 0.7 million of which actually live in Metro Nashville.
I did find one part of the articles I read about this to be odd, though. It says that the bill applied to airports in cities over 500,000 people, which meant it applied only to Nashville. But, Memphis has 630,000 people, only about 70,000 fewer than Nashville (it was actually larger than Nashville until 2016.) It does appear that the Memphis airport is actually located inside Memphis, so I’m not sure how this would apply to Nashville and not also Memphis.
Gary love the site but please stop with the paywallled links. There’s no way I’m going to subscribe to something for one time read, or two time read or three time read.