Man, have you ever been stuck on an airplane anywhere near the lavatory? It can be a downright miserable experience. And the attached PDF is a scanned copy of a customer letter sent to Continental Airlines by a passenger seated directly beside the toilet on a nice long flight.

Here is a choice quote from the letter, but I’m telling you - you’ve got to read it yourself. It brought tears to my eyes!

I constructed a stink-shield by shoving one end of a blanket into the overhead compartment - while effective in blocking at least some of the smell, and offering a small bit of privacy, the ass-on-my-body factor has increased, as without my evil glare passengers feel free to lean up against what they think is some kind of blanketed wall!

Read the entire letter here.

Yea! Southwest Airlines just sent me an e-mail today that very soon they will be restructuring their boarding process. This should help eliminate some of that …having to get to the gate to stand in line for an hour in a cattle stall before you board the plane… crap!

The deal is, now instead of just having a free for all, when you login on line and print your boarding pass you will be assigned a number along with your boarding group. Monitors will direct people to board according to the new more specific groupings, and you don’t have to stand in line to do it!
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I was tipped off to this ACLU article by T-Critic, whom I have a daily subscription to and always enjoy seeing the new T-Shirt designs.

Did you know that wearing a t-shirt with Arabic writing to an airport is the equivalent of a “person wearing a t-shirt at a bank stating, ‘I am a robber’”? No? Then you clearly don’t work with the TSA, who barred Reed Jarrar over there from boarding his flight at JFK because his shirt had terrifying non-Roman characters on it.

The shirt did also have English characters under the Arabic script (it says “We will not be silent” — no, but you certainly will be delayed), but that could easily be a terrorist trick, trying to convince gullible American infidels that the shirt doesn’t actually say “If you can read this I am going to run this airplane into the Kennedy Center.”

The ACLU has taken Jarrar’s case and they encourage passengers across the nation to show up at airports in t-shirts with big cartoon bombs on them or that say “Big Johnson Says You Can Tell a Lot About a Man by the Size of His Shoe Bomb” because frankly donations have been way up over the last couple years.

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I’ve been talking about how crappy airline service has become lately, and I just read this article from the Wharton School which I thought I’d share:

Wharton professor Serguei Netessine’s trip from Philadelphia to Dallas in May was an all-too-typical day in the sky.

After circling Dallas for an hour because of stormy weather, his flight was diverted to San Antonio where he spent several hours on the runway waiting for the storms in Dallas to clear and eating a bag of peanuts for lunch. He arrived in Dallas five hours late and missed most of his scheduled meetings, rescheduled his appointments for later in the day and succeeded in booking — actually overbooking, as it turned out — what he thought would be an evening flight back to Philadelphia. He had no choice but to fly home the next day after paying $400 for the only room available at the airport Park Hyatt.

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Everyone is aware of American Airlines and most other carriers elite status levels. These are the people who are invited to board the planes first, get free upgrades, and even get the best seats in the first few rows of the economy seating section (you might not have known that).

Normally in order to achieve elite status you would need to fly at least 25,000 qualifying miles in order to achieve the lowest level of Gold, or 50,000 to earn Platinum. However it is actually possible to get your upgrades with only 5,000 or 10,000 miles respectively.
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I travel. A lot! What’s a lot? Well, in the last 8 weeks I’ve been on 20 different airplanes. (And I’m writing this while waiting for a flight now…) And you know what I’m sick of even more than the overpriced airlines and late arrivals? The other passengers.

I’ve developed the following list of rules that people need to follow for the general betterment of mankind when traveling by air. If you violate them, just know that I - and probably everyone else - am cursing you and wishing horrible things upon your bloodline.
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As previously mentioned, I’ve been using Kayak for travel planning for some time now, but I actually just discovered a new feature that is one of, if not the, best tools I’ve yet seen for helping to plan vacations that involve air travel.

The Kayak Buzz section offers a very cool, Google Map enabled shopping comparison tool which overlays destinations onto a regional or world map. The site lists the top deals for any given period of time and generally helps you decide where to go on vacation.
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Wow.This is not a joke! The US Transportation Security Agency has already installed a machine in the Phoenix airport that literally sees through 100% of your clothes down to your bare skin and can display high resolution images of you in all your naked glory.

Assuming that all goes well with the initial run of the backscatter at Sky Harbor, similar technologies will be introduced to a number of other major U.S. airports early in 2007.
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The holiday travel season is upon us, so the airlines will be overbooking flights like no other time of year. Add to that the unpredictability of weather this time of year and you’ve got both a recipe for disaster and for opportunity.

As a former VP of Sales, it’s fair to say I did a bit of traveling. So here are my top tips should you find yourself in a position to volunteer to be bumped from a flight. Keep in mind that if you do this, you will be inconvienced, and it can really suck. So make sure that you get enough to make it worth your while or… just don’t do it.
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There are several sites out there that are designed to help keep track of your travel rewards programs (Points.com, AwardWallet.com, etc.).

However, there is also some free software which might work better for folks who prefer to keep all of that personal information on their own laptop as opposed to some site out on the Internet which they have no control over.
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I don’t mean for this to sound insensitive, but… Great! Now every moron that decides to scribble a bomb threat on a napkin and leave it on a plane can ensure that the aviation industry cowers to their prank.
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Within the last two weeks American Airlines and Southwest Airlines, along with the cities of Dallas and Ft. Worth, have come to an agreement to basically repeal the Wright amendment - a law which has prevented Southwest from flying directly from Dallas to anywhere other than within Texas and a few border states.

This is a huge deal for anyone that ever flys in or out of the DFW area. Since American Airlines is based out of DFW International airport they have had a stranglehold on flights inter-state flights.

To give one example, when I was living in Maryland I could get a non-stop flight on Southwest from BWI for $200 round trip. But to go to Dallas on AA cost at least $300. And Dallas is actually a shorter flight!
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