Airlines often claim an exemption to European delay compensation rules due to “extraordinary circumstances” that couldn’t have been avoided, and there’s much litigation over this most of which having been resolved in favor of the passenger. For instance while strikes and weather can be extraordinary, mechanical issues generally aren’t.
When airlines don’t pay some passengers who have been stiffed have gotten creative, sending bailiffs to airline offices.
Women were lining up for the lavatory for about ten minutes, and no one was coming out. That’s usually when you hope a flight attendant will put some coffee grounds in there between uses. A flight attendant notices the line, saying to one of the women “you’re still right here” as no one has moved.
When the lavatory door opens a man appears and then “[j]ust a few seconds later, a woman in a matching red jumper also walks out from the cramped room, apparently having just joined the Mile High Club.”
Maybe this isn’t the strangest part of the story, but it strikes me that the racist would demand that minorities serve him, not that they not be allowed to perform in servile roles.
According to the man’s attorney his family is the real victim here, the man’s wife “suffered from stress due to the allegation” and he lost his job. They’re not even welcome at their kids’ school anymore. The man and his wife are New Zealanders and even considered moving back there.
A roundup of the most important stories of the day. I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips.
We all know how overpriced minibars can be. And in major cities you have to take out a second mortgage to afford a cocktail in the bar, too. In one case that turns out to be literally true. Insult to injury? The foreign transaction fees.
News that an American Airlines mechanic in Miami sabotaged an aircraft before it prepared to take off with passengers was truly shocking. The man admitted that he wanted to delay or cancel the flight out of frustration with union contract talks, and to force more overtime work to fix the problem he had caused.
American Airlines had to address the issue with employees as well. Here’s the memo that was sent internally:
A roundup of the most important stories of the day. I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips.
Michele Ballarin is a West Virginia heiress who served as a go-between with Somali pirates and tried to get the CIA to hire her to kill Al Qaeda jihadists. She was “a trusted confidante of Somali pirates and warlords.”
Ballarin ran for Congress in the 1980s in Morgantown but the 31 year old lost badly, paying for her campaign “with money from her first husband, a man several decades older than her who had landed on the Normandy beaches on D-Day and amassed a small fortune as a real-estate developer.” She and her second husband, a bartender at Manhattan’s 21 Club, moved to Georgetown and then moved to an estate in Markham, Virginia named “Wolf’s Crag,” which had belonged to a famous Confederate commander known as “The Black Knight of the Confederacy.”
For travel between mid-October and early December, and again January through mid-May (in other words outside of peak holiday dates and before peak summer) you can get some amazing coach fares to Europe from across the U.S.
Travel is available to Zurich, Munich, Geneva, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Vienna, Brussels, Berlin, and Dusseldorf and this deal is available for people departing from at least 30 different U.S. cities.
We haven’t reached the point of a strike, and the airline and its mechanics are headed back to the bargaining table with the National Mediation Board next week. However tensions have certainly been high. For instance a video of an American Airlines supervisor yelling at a mechanic went viral in June (though note there’s NSFW language):
Now we’ve learned that at least one mechanic took things way too far
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 »
