If you haven’t seen it already, Southwest has one awesome rapping flight attendent. He got to show his skills again to celebrate Southwest’s new service to LaGuaria airport.
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 AIM 120 AMRAAM Model Rocket In early June a Continental Airlines Commuter jet had a close encounter. While flying out of Houston, they saw a missile-like object flying at about 16,000 feet. At first the six foot long object was heading towards the aircraft, but fortunately veered off. This near miss happened almost exactly one year after a similar occurrence in the same Texas county. It is now believed to be a model rocket fired from a hobbyist on the ground. Even though there was no immediate danger to the plane, it still could have turned out terrible if the rocket would have hit the plane and obviously caused a distraction of the pilots. Model rockets of this size require a permit to launch in Texas. Source: KAUZ Image: karl.simpson Continental Airlines Boeing 737 Continental Airlines made a little mistake with sending a ten year old girl to Newark, when her grandparents were waiting for her in Cleveland. Her grandparents called her father asking where she was when she didn’t get off the plane. For 45 long minutes the father was panicked trying to track down the location of his daughter, until discovering Continental had escorted her to the wrong airport. Continental states that there were two flights leaving from the same doorway and miscommunication led to the girl being placed on the wrong flight. When the mistake was uncovered, the girl was placed on another plane and sent safely to her grandparents. Continental offered to waive the $75 unaccompanied minor fee, but the father stated, “You can bet they’ll be refunding a lot more than that fee by the time I’m done with them. My father-in-law laughed when they made the offer, it was so outrageous.” Certainly mistakes like this happen, but it seems like airlines should be ready to bend over backwards to make things right with the affected family, if for no other reason than to avoid bad publicity like they’re getting. UPDATE: It turns out that Continental did this TWICE this weekend. They put an 8yr old girl on a wrong flight as well. Read more… Source: WCVB Image: code20photog
 A Boeing 767-300 will employ fuel-saving measures and GPS navigation on a trans-Atlantic flight. American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami on Thursday will be the first trans-Atlantic flight to test several fuel-economy measures and GPS navigation. Strategies to save fuel and reduce carbon emissions, which American and other airlines have been testing individually for awhile now, include one-engine taxi and gradual (as opposed to incremental) take-off and landing. The Boeing 767-300 will also use GPS technology for a more direct route than typical jetliner highways, again saving fuel and reducing emissions. And with the Flight 447 tragedy fresh in our minds, it’s important to note that GPS will eventually be able to track planes’ locations far beyond the accuracy of radar. Source: Los Angeles Times  Work in progress: The tunnel has been dug underneath the airfield of Terminal 5 As part of Heathrow’s £900m (roughly $1.5 billion) overhaul of their luggage system, The British Airports Authority (BAA) is building a massive underground tunnel to transport bags between two terminals. The tunnel will run for over a mile, evading subway lines and underground fuel tanks. Currently luggage transfer between Terminals 3 and 5 can take over an hour – the new tunnel will save about 20 minutes. You may remember Heathrow had major luggage problems last year with the opening of Terminal 5, but this very public upset did not prompt the tunnel plans, supposedly, nor will it entirely prevent lost luggage in the future. A BAA spokesperson said, “There are so many different reasons why bags can go missing…. Baggage is a very complex world.” Construction is happening 24 hours a day, with the hope of opening the tunnel by the end of 2011. I don’t know, but spending multi-million dollars to shave an hour-long baggage wait down to 40 minutes seems a bit wasteful to me, especially in these harsh economic times. And people don’t even get to go down into the tunnel which seems like the coolest part! Source: The Guardian Image: MailOnline |
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