Anyone who knows me knows that I love three-holers, that is to say I love the Boeing 727, McDonnell Douglas DC-10 and MD-11 and of course the Lockheed L-1011. As a native New Yorker, growing up next to JFK International Airport and a few miles from LaGuardia Airport, I grew up not only watching three-holers…
All aircraft undergo routine maintenance checks at specific life cycle intervals, these checks range from a light A-Check through a heavy D-Check. An A-Check for a commercial aircraft is typically performed around 800 flight hour cycle and often conducted during an overnight layover at an airport, requiring 20 man-hours maintenance. The B-Check is conducted…
The mere mention of the term “Enhanced Pat Down” is enough to send many travelers into an endless rant about the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). One issue a significant group of travelers (women) seems to bring up is that more women are selected for pat downs than men. This is a statistic the TSA has…
Just before my Hurricane and Nor’easter induced break from Flying With Fish I received an email from Tim Wesolek asking, “can you [please] explain how airlines come up with flight numbers?” Well Tim, there is no straightforward answer, but I will do my best. For starters, some airlines have historical flight numbers, such…
Folks, following the past few weeks of severe weather causing all sorts of havoc in my region, starting with Hurricane Sandy and finishing up with Winter Storm Athena, I’m working to get Flying With Fish back on track. Lack of power and direct access to the internet makes writing a blog a bit of a…
Traveling for me is often about getting to and from places rather than visiting them, it’s the nature of what I do, however for the vast majority of travelers the journey is about the experience, the culture and the connections. I was reminded of this yesterday when I received an email from Julia Schultz, in…
On the 13th of February 2012 Senators Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Susan Collins (R-ME) introduced the Restoring Integrity and Good-Heartedness in Traveler Screening Act, or “RIGHTS Act,” addressing the need for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to have a passenger advocate on site, at every airport, to address immediate passenger screening issues. The RIGHTS Act…
For years my favorite aircraft paint-job has been flying on an Alaska Airlines’ Boeing 737-490, the livery know as the Salmon-Thirty-Salmon took to the skies in October 2005. The Salmon-Thirty-Salmon, pained in support of the Alaskan Seafood Industry depicts a realistic image of s salmon from nose to tail. Now, earlier this month, seven…
This morning ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize winning non-profit news organization, wrote about the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) quietly swapping certain Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) scanners from airports around the country, replacing them with other AIT scanners, implying that this is being done for health reasons. ProPublica journalist Michael Grabell writes, “The TSA is not…
Ian Freeman, the co-host of Free Talk Live, a national libertarian political talk radio show broadcast on more than 100 radio stations, and four television stations, and candidate for State Representative from Keene, New Hampshire, makes an interesting claim … he claims he is on a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Super Secret Special Searched list….
