Travel-size holy water

Airport security restrictions apparently apply to vials of holy water received from Roman Catholic pilgrimage sites, the AP reports. Several pilgrims returning to Rome from Our Lady of Lourdes in France had their holy water confiscated if it was in bottles that exceeded EU airline safety limits. The travelers were flying on the just-launched, Vatican-backed, [...]

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[Grunt] “Welcome to America, stand in line.”

At his excellent travel blog, Mark Ashley answers a question about the best way to connect to flights to Europe. His suggestions are good: avoid Heathrow, make no connections after arriving on an overnight flight, and avoid making connections in the United States on the return trip. This, he says, is because of more stringent [...]

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Red Wings for Russia?

Is it a bit unsettling that Russia’s newest low-fare carrier has adopted the colors identified with the Soviet Union? Coincidence, or part of the “Putin restoration”?

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China’s growth exception

China’s booming with a 10 percent growth rate, but there’s one area of the economy that’s been put on hold: aviation. China’s airline sector is growing at 16 percent per year. New airlines are sprouting up, and demand is growing, especially in advance of the 2008 Olympics. The airline sector is growing faster, the main [...]

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Update: Salt Lake buys service to Paris

Make no mistake: Salt Lake City has bought Paris service. Per my post a few days ago, state and local authorities have ponied up $1.9 million in incentives and subsidies, and Delta has rewarded their “investment” with nonstop service to Charles de Gaulle. “There is something different about a state and a city that has [...]

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Why don’t we build more airports? (Part 1)

Aero-News.Net reported today that the go-ahead has been given to begin construction on the new Panama City-Bay County International Airport, scheduled to open in 2010. The current airport’s longest runway is only 6,300 feet long, and there is no room for growth nearby. The airport has been located in its current place, very close to [...]

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Utah to subsidize prestige

Salt Lake City, like Cleveland, is playing the prestige game. It wants flights to Europe–Paris, in particular. And it’s going to pay for them. But does Salt Lake need flights to Europe? That’s not clear. What is clear is that Salt Lake has irrational hub-loss fear, and that often goes along with the sort of [...]

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Climate change activists to travelers: stay home

Climate change protesters are now putting their retro-radical tactics to use at airports. Protesters clashed with police over the weekend near London’s Heathrow airport, where a planned (and needed) third runway has raised the ire of environmental activists. Aviation, they say, contributes 2 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide and therefore needs to be limited, [...]

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“The real cost of air travel has fallen sharply over the past 20 years.”

Patrick Smith always has something worth reading in his Ask the Pilot column over at Salon.com, whether it’s musing on the the ugliness of the A380 or defending the safety record of Latin American airlines. Today, he calls attention to the remarkable fact that despite all the reports of bad service today, skies clogged with [...]

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The FAA: too little, too late

After several worrisome “near misses” at airports, the FAA will launch an emergency program “to reduce the risk of runway incursions and wrong runway departures.” Too bad the FAA’s NextGen air traffic control system is years overdue. The FAA not only fails to grow to accommodate the dynamism of our air travel sector, its lack [...]

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