Today’s reader mail is a familiar complaint on a topic I have covered many times, how to help an airline find your baggage once it has been “lost” … although lost isn’t really the right term. The majority of “lost baggage” simply never made a connection, was checked in to close to flight time, or…
There are many oddities in international travel, often occurring with Immigrations and Customs. Today I ran across  Sexism at the border: A personal account by Clay Nikiforuk, which annoyed me to no end. Whether or not all the details of her story are accurate, the issues in the story bother me. The story is not…
Its that time of the year again … the last hours of this year are dwindling fast … the end of the year is near. Outside my window the snow has finally fallen, being whipped around in the wind, while at this moment friends in Australia are already three hours into the New Year…
The photography and airline interwebs are abuzz with a scathing blog post by photographer Jess T. Dugan claiming that on the 18th of December 2012, flying between Chicago O’Hare and Boston Logan, on JetBlue flight 922, the airline stole her camera gear. There are lessons to be learned here for photographers from Ms. Dugan’s unfortunate…
It is the dream of many people to live and work in the United States. Some people come to the United States legally, some illegally … and some come here legally and simply stay illegally. For Bimbo Oyewole, a Nigerian immigrant, who had spent the past twenty years as a security supervisor at Newark…
What might seem like common sense for one traveler may be an unknown topic for another. Walk through any airport at any time of day you’ll see people breezing through check in and others struggling to understand the process at the counter. Step into an airport security screening checkpoint and you’ll see some pros zip…
Recently Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) introduced House Resolution 3608, the Stop TSA’s Reach In Policy Act … also known as the STRIP Act, which would “strip” Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Transportation Security Officers (TSO) of their “police like” badges and “law enforcement” uniforms. Before we can go forward in discussing Rep. Blackburn’s STRIP Act,…
Baggage is an annoyance on the road; even carry on baggage, especially short trips. Travel with bags slows travelers up at security check points, leaves traveler property at risk for theft or loss at security check points … and for day trips requires travelers to schlep their bags wherever they go. Yes, I admit, there…
This coming Monday, the 8th of November, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) expects to announce that it will prohibit airline passengers from flying with printer ink and toner cartridges, sized at 16oz by volume or larger. This will be Security Directive (SD) 1554-10-05. As of this evening, the TSA appears to be working on the…
Two days ago a historic moment occurred at London’s Gatwick International Airport … however it happened a nine days later than planned considering much of Europe’s airspace had been closed due to a volcanic ash cloud. On Sunday afternoon an Iraqi Airways Boeing 737-400 (operated by Tor Air) touched down at London Gatwick Airport (LGW)…
