The girl featured in this video was stranded in the Pittsburgh International Airport for 10 hours during Snowpocalypse ‘09. She passed the time by video taping herself. Well done!
Via Boing Boing

[Click the comic strip to see larger version]

One again I had the privilege to fly Southwest Airlines last week when I took a business trip to New Orleans. I thought it would be much better flying Southwest this time since they introduced their new line policy. You no longer need to line up immediately upon arriving to your gate. Once you check in, your place is saved in line. I arrived two hours early and ended up with B44. Not bad, I thought. As illustrated in the cartoon above, I ended up with the center seat.

I think it’s time for Southwest to abandon the whole “Grab any seat you want” policy. It may have worked well in the seventies when the planes flew with less people, However it’s not working so well these days.

Here’s an example. Say I purchase a ticket to go see my relatives up in the northeast six months in advance. The day I’m to return, I spend a little more time with my family. I arrive at the airport just under an hour before my flight leaves. I potentially end up with a “C” line ticket. The only advantage to buying my ticket ahead of time is the monetary savings. It doesn’t guarantee my place in line. I would rather know I had a center seat at the time of booking. I’ll take that incentive any day of the week.

C’mon Southwest, you’re the airlines with heart. How about cutting us all a break. Even Subway abandoned that silly sandwich cut. (Remember the cut where it appeared there was more on the sandwich because all the meat and toppings hung out the side) Sure it’s great to be different but let’s face it, people hate it. It makes us feel like we’re all cattle lining up. This is a new century. Start listening to your patrons. SWITCH TO ASSIGNED SEATING!

Also see:
Southwest Airlines reservations – or why I don’t like to fly Southwest
Virgin America is the new jetBlue
Dog + Pig

After spending five and a half hours on the tarmac in Austin Texas late last year, It was interesting to read that 2007 was one of the worst travel years on record.

Here are a few of my favorites from a USAtoday article:

• A passenger in first class on a British Airways Delhi-London flight in March awoke to discover that a corpse, upgraded from coach, had been propped in a seat in his row.”She kept slipping under the seat belt and moving about with the motion of the plane,” Paul Trinder told Britain’s Sunday Times. “When I asked what was going on, I was shocked to hear she was dead.”
• A 64-year-old man was hospitalized earlier this month after chugging a liter of vodka rather than surrendering it at a checkpoint in Germany’s Nuremberg airport.
• SkyWest airlines apologized to a passenger who said he was forced to urinate in an airsickness bag during a short flight in March because the only restroom was closed due to a malfunctioning light. The man told the Salt Lake Tribune he’d had two “really big beers. It was like I had no choice.” The pilot called police upon landing in Salt Lake, but the airline later gave the passenger a travel voucher in addition to the apology.
• In July, a flight from St. Petersburg, Russia, to Turkey turned back after the crew was unable to break up a fight involving three inebriated men. It started, said the Russian News and Information Agency, when one of the men was “given the cold shoulder” by a woman he was chatting up and hit her in the face.
• Toilets overflowed on an Amsterdam-Newark flight on Continental Airlines in June, causing passenger Collin Brock to tell a Seattle television station King 5 News, “I was forced to sit next to human excrement for seven hours.”
• Passengers weren’t the only ones guilty of bad behavior in 2007. In April, a Northwest Airlines pilot locked himself in an airline restroom, where he had a loud, obscenity-laced conversation on his cellphone as passengers boarded his flight in Las Vegas. When confronted by a passenger, the pilot cussed at him. The flight was canceled as a result of “inappropriate language by a crewmember,” the airline said.
• A stowaway squirrel on an American Airlines flight from Tokyo to Dallas in February caused the plane to land in Honolulu. An airline spokesman told the Associated Press the pilots were worried the “varmint” might damage the plane’s wiring.
• Nepal Airlines personnel sacrificed two goats on the runway in front of a malfunctioning Boeing 757 to appease the “Hindu god of sky protection,” Reuters wire service reported in September. After the goat sacrifice, the plane took off for Hong Kong.
• Not even Vatican-backed Mistral Air was willing to appeal to a higher power when authorities confiscated holy water from pilgrims returning from the Roman Catholic shrine at Lourdes, France. The airline’s president cited rules that ban carry-on containers holding more than 3 ounces of liquid, telling the Associated Press, “These (regulations) have to be respected.”

[Thanks JC]

When jetBlue first rolled out in 2001, I was one of the early adopters. No first class, all leather seats, DirectTV… WHAT, TV on a plane? Why didn’t anyone think of that before. After watching television on a trip from Ft. Lauderdale to New York, I was hooked. How could I possibly fly any other airline. Why would I want to fly any other airline.

So there it is. JetBlue figured out what jet setters wanted and boy did they deliver. Did I care about the simple snacks served on jetBlue? Those terraBLUE chips. (Okay, I get it, I get it), those cookies, and all the other tasty morsels they offer. The snacks are unlimited and you can eat as many snacks as you wish. They even give you little bottles of water. Doesn’t this make sense on a plane. It sure beats those sad little cups of water those other airlines offer.

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Although there are a lot of fans of Southwest Airlines out there, I cannot be counted as one of them. After flying them this past weekend from South Florida to New Orleans, there is plenty for me to gripe about.

First of all, I’m not a fan of Southwest’s open seating policy. Sure it sounds like a great idea getting to choose where you would like to sit. However, it is only a great idea if the plane is 50% filled. If the plane is over sold, like most of the flights on Southwest, it doesn’t really work out for the consumer. Instead of a seat assignment, you receive a letter on your boarding pass – either A, B, or C. Of course the letters are first come first serve. “A”s, then “B”s, then “C”s. And here’s what that translates to:

A – Aisle – What the first people in the plane usually select

B – Window – Not the Aisle but close enough

C – Center – What the last resort is if you wish to fly

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