The 10 Best Cities In The World

by Gary Leff

Jul 26 2022

The Economist produces a research report on the top 10 most livable cities in the world. How many have you been to? How do your favorites fare? What Are The World’s Most Livable Cities? This year’s top 10 most livable cities are ranked as: Vienna Copenhagen Zurich + Calgary Vancouver Geneva Frankfurt Toronto Amsterdam Osaka and Melbourne Can this list make any sense at all? Many of these cities are awesome, I'm sure, but these lists tend to be biased towards cities that are cold, expensive, or boring, which suggests that the listmakers have a shitty definition of "livability". — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 25, 2022 Vienna is incredible, but I wouldn’t want to live there though I’ve been attached to it since Richard Linklater’s 1995 classic Before Sunrise where young American Ethan Hawke is…

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Impossible To Parody: London Heathrow Boss On Summer Travel

by Gary Leff

plane tails
Jul 26 2022

According to the CEO of London Heathrow, “The summer getaway has started well at Heathrow, thanks to early planning and keeping demand in line with airline ground-handler capacity.”

Any issues, he says, are the fault of airlines failing to “recruit and train more ground handlers” and fault with the airport lies only in not having enough money for capital investment, but that’s the fault of the global pandemic not the airport itself

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Raise The Pilot Retirement Age!

by Gary Leff

young female pilot ready for takeoff
Jul 25 2022

The U.S. government imposes numerous rules to keep commercial airline pilots scarce. This is done under the guise of safety, but the rules don’t actually have anything to do with safety.

The problem is that more available pilots means less leverage for pilots unions, and since union contracts determine who flies which aircraft, which routes, and which schedules – and therefore how much a pilot gets paid – largely based on seniority, a higher retirement age while good for older union members is bad for younger ones.

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American Airlines Not Ready To Invest In Better Technology To Track Your Luggage

by Gary Leff

Jul 25 2022

At the internal company ‘state of the airline’ meeting after Thursday’s earnings call (a recording of which was reviewed by View From The Wing), Chief Operating Officer David Seymour argued that it doesn’t make sense to upgrade baggage tracking technology until their airline partners have done so first. And CEO Robert Isom says that lagging technology at some of their hubs makes it harder to do so.

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