After spending seven years gallivanting around England largely unsupervised with her friends while fending off the minions of He Who Must Not Be Named, you’d think Emma Watson could handle entering the United States alone. Last month, however, the 22 year old actress, best known for her role as Harry Potter’s friend Hermione Granger, was...
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Another day, another airport shut down. Following yesterday’s evacuation of San Antonio’s airport, Chicago O’Hare’s Terminal 2 has had all operations suspended and passengers have been ordered out of the ticketing level due to ‘suspicious activity’. UPDATE(FINAL): The terminal reopened at 4PM local time. A TSA dog had identified a suspicious package which was...
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Both terminals at San Antonio Airport have been evacuated after a specific bomb threat was received. Passengers were removed from planes and lined up on the tarmac. Bomb-sniffing dogs have identified three suspicious cars and police are investigating their contents. UPDATE(5:03PM EST): @NYCAviation reports: UPDATE: Two of the three suspicious cars at San Antonio...
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In July 1942, Hitler continued to gain ground against the Soviet Union. The United States was only seven months into its participation in World War II. The Manhattan Project had not yet even begun. And a 16 year old New Yorker named Azriel “Al” Blackman took a job as a mechanic for American Export...
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Earlier this week, Melinda Deaton and her family filed a complaint claiming that TSA agents had strip-searched her, mocked her feeding tube, and physically handled, it, putting her at risk for infection as she traveled from Dallas to a Minnesota medical appointment. Nothing to worry about though. The TSA has already completed its thorough...
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Life With Dogs reports that disabled veteran Jim Stanek was called ‘retarded’ and his service dog kicked during a 48 hour ordeal when they were stranded in Dulles airport. Staneck and his service dog Sarge spent 48 hours stranded in the Dulles Airport after numerous flight cancellations and delays. Wounded in battle, Staneck suffers...
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Clive Irving is an expert on Boeing. He wrote a 1993 book on the history of the 747. The 737 is the bestselling commercial airliner. Nearly 10,000 have been produced over 40 years. Irving says there are serious issues with the fuselage design of the 737. Specifically, he says that the skin is too...
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Airline food has a deservedly bad reputation, though as meals are decreasingly available, some travelers may be pining for the old lump of mystery meat in bland sauce. Passengers on Delta flights out of Amsterdam are to be forgiven for wishing that Delta had eliminated meal service prior to their flights. Two passengers,...
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Blogger Bob Burns of the TSA reports that an unnamed intrepid agent successfully utilized the TSA’s enhanced pat down procedure to discover between 1000 and 2000 Ecstasy pills that had been secreted in the traveler’s underwear. The explosive discovery was made at LAX. No doubt, the discovery of a hidden, illegal, but not dangerous...
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We were disturbed by reports today that two British travelers were questioned, detained, and deported by the Department of Homeland Security, allegedly because of two tweets. Leigh Van Bryan and Emily Bunting say they were questioned for hours, detained, placed in a cell with violent criminals who stole their food, and finally sent back...
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We’ve long been fans of Kayak.com, though we have to admit that as of late, increased clutter and unreliability or lack of JetBlue results have had us using the site less often. Like most comparison sites, Kayak uses ITA software’s technology. ITA was purchased by Google last year, amid much fear that Google would...
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Having never flown Alaska Airlines, it was news to us that for 30 years, together with their meals, the airline has distributed prayer cards featuring serene color pictures and verses from the Book of Psalms. Now we’ll never have a chance to get one, as the airline announced that it will stop distributing the...
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The Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport is the 22nd busiest in the United States- and it’s about to get busier. On Monday, a ground-breaking ceremony was heldat the airport, marking the beginning of a $791 million runway expansion project. A princely sum, indeed, but the project which will lengthen an existing secondary runway from 5,276...
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For the second time in a week, the Earth has been hit by a coronal mass ejectionin the most severe solar storm since 2003. The increased radiation from the charged particles of the storm which can interfere with communications is strongest near the poles where the ozone layer is thinnest. The additional radiation poses...
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43 year old Adam Blumenkranz of Los Angeles was arrested at Newark’s Liberty Airport Monday after he was discovered smoking marijuana in airport restroom on JetBlue flight 510 from Fort Lauderdale to Newark. Blumenkranz, who was somehow unaware that smoking of any kind is prohibited on aircraft, tried to show his medicinal marijuana card...
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After his son, Senator Rand Paul, was detained and denied boarding for refusing an invasive pat-down, Representative Ron Paul issued a sharply-worded statement promising to eliminate the TSA should he be elected President “The police state in this country is growing out of control,” the elder Paul said in a statement released by his...
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All was normal aboard American Airlines Flight 980 from Brazil to Miami. Then, two hours into the eight hour flight, with food service underway, the plane suddenly lurched violently. The unexpected turbulencesent a food cart flying, damaging the ceiling and landing on and injuring a flight attendant. In all, six members of the flight...
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Angeline O’Grady wants to know what happened to her husband. On November 1, she was traveling through Philadelphia International Airport with the ashes of her late husband, Brian. She was told by TSA agents that she could not bring the ashes through security with her. TSA policy explicitly allows cremated remains to be taken...
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A short time ago, we reported that the TSA had detained Senator Rand Paul this morning. The Hill is now reportingthat the TSA is denying that Senator Paul was detained, saying rather that he was escorted from the secure area and not allowed to board his flight. “When an irregularity is found during the...
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We don’t agree with most of what Senator Rand Paul stands for, but we agree wholeheartedly with his stand for liberty and personal freedom this morning in Nashville. It is being reported that Paul, the son of Texas congressman and Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, refused an “enhanced pat-down” by TSA agents after setting...
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The @TSABlogTeam just tweeted a picture of “9 of the 24 loaded firearms found in carry-on bags at TSA checpoints last week”. We have 3 questions that we hope they will answer for us, but we presume they won’t. 1) Is there any evidence that any of these 24 guns were connected to a...
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Brad Hall “designs systems for improving workforce performance”. Brad Hall has a PhD industrial-organizational psychology. Brad Hall knows that U.S airlines have awful customer service. And Brad Hall knows why- unions. It is a foregone conclusion for Dr. Hall; one he is unwilling to let facts get in the way of. Dr. Hall begins...
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Nine endangered whooping cranes, migrating from Wisconsin to Florida, recently spent a month grounded in Alabama, after the FAA decided that their “pilot guides” were operating in violation of a regulation which prohibits them from receiving pay for their services. The pilots, who work for Operation Migration are outfitted to look like the birds,...
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Out with the new, in with the old. After years of seemingly inevitable decline in the face of competition from jets, turboprops are making a comeback as oil prices remain high. ATR, a turboprop manufacturer partly owned by Airbus parent EADS, received firm orders for 157 planes in 2011, with options for an additional...
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On August 22, 2007, an AirTran pilot noted an imbalanced wheel on his plane. Over the next two days, he filed 10 reports over this safety issue. AirTran removed the pilot from flying on Aug. 23, 2007, the second day he was operating the plane with the loose wheel, which was taken out of...
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