Operating an airline is expensive and complex and it seems many airlines seem to be in existence only because their government keeps them afloat. In 1932 Air India was created, as Tata Airlines, a mail carrier. In 1953 Tata Airlines was nationalized and renamed Air India, an international airline, while Indian Airlines was created as…
POST EDITED ON 10-MARCH-2011 : CORRECT AN ERROR IN THE FINANCIAL NUMBERS CAUSED BY A SPELL CHECKER The Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) budget is enormous, but is the agency prioritizing and allocating its funds in the most effective manner? At present the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) lists the TSA’s budget at US$8,164,780,000 with US$7,910,780,000…
It’s the end of an era for NASA, as Space Shuttle Discovery, the oldest Space Shuttle, makes her final landing. Today, at 11:57:17am EST, one minute ahead of schedule, Space Shuttle Discovery’s main landing gear touched down on Runway 15, at the Shuttle Landing Facility, at the Kennedy Space Center, ending the Shuttle’s 27-year flying…
This past Sunday evening, as the sun was setting over Frankfurt Airport, I had the opportunity to wander freely around a Lufthansa Airbus A380-800 at a Lufthansa Technik hanger as a guest of the airline. Yesterday I wrote about the A380’s three classes of cabins and what passengers can expect on board … today, it’s…
The word “behemoth” does not adequately describe the Airbus A380-800 … especially when you’re standing under it. I have stood beneath the Boeing 747-400, stood inside the engine of a Boeing 777-200, flown in cavernous belly of a Lockheed C-5 Galaxy, each of which are massive and I have seen the Airbus A380-800 from a…
For the vast majority of travelers the single most stressful portion of air travel is the airport experience. Airport terminals are crowded, noisy, security lines can move at a snails pace, security screeners may be less than polite, the benches aren’t comfortable and the food selection options are dismal. For the privileged, Lufthansa has a…
Airline passengers complain about all sorts of things. You name it, they complain about it … bad food, cramped seats, jet lag, boring movies, passengers passing gas next to them and odd odors in the air. While passengers will always have something to complain about … passengers flying with Air Malawi may no longer be…
It is hard to believe I have been traveling with an iPad for well over half-a-year now and an 11″ MacBook Air for more than a month. Both of these travel tools have changed how I work on the road and how I pack … but both tools present a consistent problem at the start…
This blog post was supposed to be about the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the upcoming vote to unionize the agency’s Transportation Security Officers (TSO). In the process of researching what should have been a very minor point of reference, which probably would have barely been mentioned here … the minor detail became a story…
If you like commercial airliners there is one journalist you should be reading on a daily basis … Jon Ostrower. Jon, the brilliant author behind Flightglobal’s FlightBlogger, covers Boeing like no one else. Not only does Jon get into every nook-and-cranny of what is going on with Boeing’s commercial airplanes, but he does it a…
