Review: Crockfords Las Vegas (Hilton LXR)

Aug 12 2023

I’m back from several days at the Crockfords Las Vegas LXR property. It was recommended to me by Michael Trager of TravelZork. When I was looking for a long weekend in Vegas, Michael is the expert I knew would be able to answer what’s the best overall value in Las Vegas right now and this was his answer. He was correct.

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Flight Attendant Raps Her Announcements While Passengers Cheer

Aug 11 2023

If there’s one thing that differentiates Southwest Airlines from other carriers, besides bundling checked bags into the fare and not assigning seats prior to boarding, it’s that their employees don’t seem to hate their jobs. This comes out most clearly on board with flight attendant hijinks, whether it’s hiding inside of overhead bins, making crowns for passengers out of snacks, or offering a creative twist on safety announcements.

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Oakland Airport Considers Name Change Because Americans Can’t Find City On A Map

Aug 11 2023

It doesn’t seem like the major challenge with transcon and long haul international flights from the airport is the airport’s name as port officials seem to suggest. And “East Bay Oakland International Airport” doesn’t seem like it would do much to change that. For political reasons it doesn’t seem like they’d consider “San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport.” But why not? European low cost carriers have long promoted Bratislava as Vienna even though it’s literally in another country!

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Government Defends FBI Agents Placing Innocent People On No Fly List

Aug 11 2023

Using unreviewable, secret and often arbitrary Minority Report-style pre-crime profiling as a basis for denying any kind of right is a huge departure for our system of justice. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is considering whether someone placed on a No Fly List as retaliation for not becoming an FBI informant, when there’s no suggestion they’ve done anything wrong, is a clearly-enough established violation of rights to justify damages. The Biden administration Justice Department says it is not.

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How A United Airlines First Officer Almost Plunged A Boeing 777 Into The Ocean

Aug 10 2023

NTSB found that the captain, who hand-flew the takeoff, called for flaps to be reduced from 20 to 5. However the first officer “thought that he heard the captain announce flaps 15.”

The cause of the incident was attributed to “[t]he flight crew’s failure to manage the airplane’s vertical flightpath, airspeed, and pitch attitude following a miscommunication about the captain’s desired flap setting during the initial climb.”

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