Following the recent Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 incident, the NTSB determined that the cockpit voice recorder, in place to help review aviation incidents and make flying safer, had already been recorded over. Two hours of recording time isn’t enough when it takes awhile to recover a ‘black box’. But pilot unions say their members’ privacy trumps safety.
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.
Over the summer a woman noticed the guy seated in front of her and ‘took her shot’ writing her number on a Southwest Airlines napkin and passing it to him, suggesting he text her if he is single and interested.
She followed up on social media to let everyone know how it worked out.
Air France does a nice job generally selecting its business class wines. Their customers expect it. But budgets are still constrained in business class, both in the air and on the ground.
So I was shocked when a reader spotted a single bottle of 2011 Chateau Branaire Ducru St. Julien in their Paris Charles de Gaulle Terminal 2E Hall M business lounge. Wow. It turned out to be the last or only bottle they had, and he finished it off for them.
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.
A passenger boarded a redeye flight, and spent 6 hours with their flashing rainbow charging cable plugged into their coach seat while passengers around them filmed because it was too bright for them to sleep.
Seth Dillon, CEO at news satire website Babylon Bee, was flying American Airlines out of Columbia, South Carolina on Saturday morning and reported that the flight was oversold by 20 passengers. He suggests that 70 people checked in for a flight that only seated 50.
The airline’s gate agent had a unique threat to get passengers to make their way to Charlotte by car instead of plane: threatening that if there weren’t 20 volunteers to do this, then nobody would be flying and they’d cancel the flight instead. Apparently the threat worked, but it was a complete fabrication.
United Airlines’ elite status rules for 2024 see only minor adjustments, with the most notable change being the enhanced role of credit card spending in status qualification, not as extensive as American or Delta. Additionally, United’s response to Delta’s controversial changes includes maintaining its status match offer, leading to a surge in requests following Delta’s initial announcement of more stringent elite status qualifications and lounge access. Now their status match offer is back.
A Filipino woman applied for a Schengen Visa to visit Italy. This European visa was denied, because authorities weren’t convinced she would leave the country before her visa expired.
She reapplied for her visa, and this time included an e-mail confirmation of future-dated tickets to go see Taylor Swift in Singapore.
Alaska Airlines quickly completed inspections on at least a quarter of the aircraft, failing to find any issues similar to the 10 week old plane on which “a kid in that row [where the aircraft’s fuselage ruptured] had his shirt was sucked off him and out of the plane and his mother was holding onto him to make sure he didn’t go with it.” Passengers reportedly had cell phones sucked out of their hands and out of the aircraft as well.
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 »
