Lost and Found Is An Airline Failure Few People Think About

by Gary Leff

There's Nothing Wrong With Flying Economy, Just Choose Your Airline Wisely
Aug 27 2022

Alaska Airlines does a nice job taking care of customers one at a time – not always and in every case, of course, but on the whole my dealings with them have been just a touch more ‘human’ than average for the U.S. airline industry. So it didn’t surprise me to see this tweet about Alaska successfully recovering a laptop left on one of their planes.

This shouldn’t be a standout, but how often do you expect to actually receive valuables returned to you if you’ve left them on a plane?

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Airlines – And Media – Should Stop Using The Deceptive Term “Direct Flight”

by Gary Leff

person pulling lugage
Aug 27 2022

Over the past several days there’s been an argument brewing on twitter over the concept of “non-stop” versus “direct” flights, and how the difference confuses consumers.

With a non-stop flight you take off from one city and land at your destination. A direct flight between those cities entails landing somewhere else first. It may really just mean a connection to another plane, but that new plane carriers the same flight number as the first one.

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Sometimes It’s Better To Just Say No When Other Passengers Ask To Switch Seats

by Gary Leff

Aug 26 2022

Some passengers simply will not change seats when asked, and that is ok. One woman absolutely won’t change seats, unless it is a celebrity doing the asking. She insists on seat 8A on Virgin Atlantic, and will take a different flight if she cannot have it. And she absolutely won’t fly in a backwards-facing business class seat.

The woman reports that a father was furious when she wouldn’t switch seats so that family could sit together – wishing her “ill for the future” and “storm[ing] off.”

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Southwest Airlines Pilot: ‘I Used To Be Liberal, Then I Left Home And Got A Job’

by Gary Leff

Aug 26 2022

Last year pilots were making announcements “Let’s Go Brandon” and that made it into air traffic control chatter too. I thought this had died out, and was now being crowded out by the counter Dark Brandon meme but pilots are still bringing their politics on board with them.

Here’s a Southwest Airlines pilot with a “I used to be liberal / Then I left home and got a job” sticker on his bag.

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