Airlines

Tuesday

Andy Pasztor

Exclusive: FAA issues autopilot warning after major airline crashes

Federal aviation regulators have issued a stark safety warning to airline pilots: think twice before switching off autopilots and other computerized flight controls at the country's busiest airports. The Federal Aviation Administration’s alert cautioned pilots about the dangers of excessive reliance on their own manual flying and visual approaches in congested airspace. The bulletin, issued in response to hazards revealed by recent “notable and high visibility” commercial aviation accidents and harrowing close calls in the US, is couched in technical jargon and was largely overlooked by the national media when it was released in early April.

FAA

Tuesday

Cockburn

The advent of the crackpot flyer

Cockburn hates to admit it, but whenever he gets on a plane he starts praying. He's not afraid of flying — so much as his fellow passengers.  The news cycle over the summer months has done little to rid Cockburn of his prejudices. Just yesterday it was reported that a business class passenger on a transatlantic flight was harassing other passengers because he didn’t receive his preferred meal. The man didn’t stop there. After exiting the plane when he had forced it to land in Chicago, instead of its intended destination Amsterdam, he then harangued the airport staff.  The videos from the flight show the passenger going on a rant that involved cursing out his fellow travelers and calling flight attendants “douches.

crackpot flyer airline passenger

Friday

Cockburn

Is Kamala right about airplane bathrooms?

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day — and Vice President Kamala Harris may have finally met her moment. The immigration-czar-slash-voting-rights-activist-slash-common-sense-gun-safety-proponent is also now taking some work off transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg's plate as he wrangles infant twins. "This issue of transportation is fundamentally about just making sure that people have the ability to get where they need to go," Kamala said of her new issue set Tuesday. First up? Expanding tiny airplane bathrooms. "The majority of domestic flights do not have accessible restrooms. This is absolutely unacceptable," Kamala tweeted. "Our administration will soon announce a solution to help end this inequity." https://twitter.

loan kamala airplane

Friday

Matthew Foldi

House Republicans demand answers from TSA over No-Fly List hack

House Republicans will be investigating the Transportation Security Administration to work out how a prolific Swiss hacker who identifies as a “tiny kitten” was able to obtain over a million entries from the No-Fly List, The Spectator has learned. The hacker, a twenty-three-year-old who goes by Maia Arson Crimew, was able to access a 2019 version of the list after what she described as just a few hours of hacking.

tsa

Monday

Teresa Mull

A pilot explains why air travel has become so stressful

Add your tropical dream vacation/work trip/family wedding to the list of lingering Covid consequences. If you’re like me, every time you head to the airport these days, you brace for your flight to be delayed or cancelled. It’s not just in our heads. If it seems that air travel has gotten less reliable since the the pandemic hit, that’s because it has. Reuters reported in August 2022 that “flight cancellations and delays by US airlines in the first seven months of the year have surpassed the comparable 2019 period.” Many of these disruptions were weather-related, but a pilot I spoke to emphasized ongoing airline staffing shortages as the biggest headache at the airport. He told me that heading into 2019, airlines were facing the biggest pilot shortage in history.

Monday

Bill McMorris

The humble minivan beats holiday airline travel

Had Benjamin Franklin stuck around another two centuries, he would have added “Holidays Promise Travel Hell” headlines to his list of life’s certainties, though the Hellfire Club’s most famous member would no doubt take umbrage at the implication. The featured players in America’s security theater, as well as its taxpayer-bailed-out airlines, rival only deadbeat dads in their inability to prepare for annual celebrations. There’s a reason transportation secretary and closet-2024 presidential contender Pete Buttigieg flies private these days, even as he reassures frustrated flyers about the abundant supply of useless meal vouchers and travel credits on offer from America’s most incompetent industry.

minivan

Tuesday

Peter Van Buren

End masking to end Inflight Fight Club

Fulfilling family obligations in 2022 means long haul flights of long hours. By “long hours,” I mean because everything has already been on Netflix, each in-air hour is longer than others. The only thing that makes in-air time tolerable is Inflight Fight Club. The first rule of Inflight Fight Club is you can talk about it; what else is there to do for seven hours? Yet as much fun as it is to watch someone combat it out with a flight attendant, all this is unnecessary. And for the lawyers, this article in no way condones violence in the air, whether it is the 800th passive aggressive reference to seats being in the upright and locked position with the deadly tray table closed, or something criminal.

mask

Saturday

Chadwick Moore

In praise of flight attendants

Well past the golden age of flying they remain magnetic. With impeccable hair, orderly posture and chipper uniform, they breeze by you through security, march in little flocks down the terminal, gaze into computer screens in which no one has ever seen the other side and always greet you with suspicion and a smile. Their authority is daubed in mystery, intrigue and just a little bit of sex. Where are they going? Where have they been? No matter how many times you might ask, you can never quite grasp, exactly, what their lives are like. Where do they sleep? What do they do when they’re not here? How do they cope with this, that, or the other?

flight attendants

Tuesday

Diederik van Hoogstraten

The international travel ban is cruel and unscientific

A man can cry in public. What can I say, I was raised in a Western-European feminist household in the 1970s. But as a middle-aged guy I did feel deeply uncomfortable the other day with my abundant display of tears. It happened at Schiphol Airport in Holland, holding on tightly to my mother before saying goodbye. She was sobbing just as hard. After the long era of separation we all experienced, I had decided to fly from Los Angeles to Amsterdam on my Dutch passport. Armed with documents proving two Moderna shots and a negative COVID test I felt completely safe to make the trip. The plan was to grab my parents, who are also vaccinated, then fly them home to LA using my American passport. Given their ages and health issues, they would need some help during the trip.

travel ban

Wednesday

Amber Duke

Will American workers see enough of the $58 billion airline bailout?

The recently passed coronavirus stimulus bill offers $58 billion in aid to the airline industry to survive the massive decrease in travel caused by the COVID-19 outbreak, but workers are already concerned that airlines are taking advantage of taxpayer money while failing to live up to promises to their employees and customers. The Treasury Department on Tuesday issued its guidelines for the $29 billion loan and $29 billion grant programs, reiterating that companies who apply for money must agree not to layoff or furlough their employees until after September 2020. Treasury also required recipients of grant money, which is earmarked for payroll assistance, to only use that money for American workers.

airline