Apparently there aren't any cute blond girls who've gone missing overseas lately, so someone at CNN got assigned to write up this tripe:

On a recent Southwest Airlines flight, a man dropped his pants and exposed himself to the female passenger sitting next to him, then punched her, according to an FBI affidavit. The plane was in midair, and the naked man reportedly grew angrier, screaming uncontrollably and shaking his fist in the air... 'Now people are more hyper-vigilant on what occurs on aircrafts,' said Ron Koziol, assistant section chief for the FBI's violent crimes unit, who calls airplanes a 'high-risk' environment.

Did you hear that? He shook his fist! Not only did he shake his fist, but he shook it in the air! If you continue reading this Woodward and Bernstein-like expose, you discover that there are 80 similar incidents every single year. We did some back of the napkin number crunching and concluded that, if you board a plane every morning for the next 365 days, you have a .00001% chance of seeing something that we have to deal with every single night on the way home from the bar.]]> Omri 2009-09-21T12:08:56-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2009/8/26/81625/7123

Going abroad on your next trip is no longer just a threat to your wallet, as a new study indicates that it could also be a threat to your health. Out of the approximate 300 cases of typhoid fever that are reported in the United States every year, most cases are believed to come from an international excursion. India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh seem to be the leading troublemakers when it comes to getting ill. Just to make you worried even more, over the last couple of decades the strains resistant to antimicrobial drugs have made treatment a little trickier.

All these numbers are coming out of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC statistics show that you probably won’t die if you get typhoid, but you will definitely spend some time in the hospital. Almost 80 percent of the patients that were studied did travel outside the country within 30 days of becoming sick. Officials looked at about 1,900 patients between 1999 and 2006. ]]> kjb 2009-08-26T11:29:41-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2009/5/13/0430/86562

Last night was a beautiful evening, that is unless you happened to be channel surfing as we were, and come across Anderson Cooper talking between shots of a Southwest Airlines plane on fire and evacuating passengers via emergency slide.

Of course it wouldn't have been a pleasant end to the day for the passengers aboard Flight 519 from New Orleans to Houston either, as sitting aboard a flaming plane wasn't in the plans.

Upon landing at Houston-Hobby airport, the Southwest jet's tire caught fire and burned steadily through until emergency personnel arrived to the crippled plane on the runway. At that point, the rear left emergency slide deployed to get all 47 passengers and 5 crew out safely. ]]> JetSetCD 2009-05-13T08:38:40-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2008/7/13/34451/3737

For a terrifying nine minute stretch last Thursday, all FAA air traffic control systems over the state of Hawaii went offline and radar scopes went black. Federal officials have said there were no close calls but, then again, who really knows? At least there were no crashes.

The cause of the mysterious computer blackout remains unknown, although a technician was working on the system right before it went down. Hawaii's airspace is relatively uncrowded but has enough regular comings and going to make even a mild outage like this a nail-biter.

Antiquated air traffic control systems are an epidemic in the US and get blamed for just about everything that makes commercial air travel miserable. The Congress has thus far refused to pony up for a much-needed new system, and the FAA is quarreling with airlines and private pilots about who will have to pay for what.

[Alex Salkever is the editor and founder of Hawaiirama.com, a Hawaii travel blog]

Related Stories:
· Nine-Minute Blackout Grips Isle Air Radar [Star Bulletin]
· The Future of Air Traffic Control [IHT]
· Airline Hell coverage [Jaunted]

[Photo: lrargerich]]]> ASalkever 2008-07-15T12:00:17-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2008/6/17/132036/615

The past 24 hours have been filled with some pretty unhappy landings. Earlier this morning in Ormond Beach, Florida, a small passenger plane was forced to make an emergency landing on Interstate 95 after it inexplicably lost power. Southbound lanes on the highway had to be shut down to accommodate the plane just before noon.

And yesterday in Phoenix, a Southwest flight coming in from Austin, Texas caught fire on the runway at Sky Harbor Airport. All 127 passengers aboard the plane had to be evacuated after the back right landing gear burst into flames. A spokeswoman for Southwest said "another plane will be put into service as soon as possible." Good idea!

Sadly for all you pyros out there, this incident didn't result in any cool photos like the ones we saw after the infamous flaming JetBlue landing in 2005.

Related Stories:
· Wheels on Southwest Plane Catch Fire [Austin A-S]
· Plane lands on I-95 in Ormond Beach [Daytona Beach N-J]
· Dangerous Travel coverage [Jaunted]

[Photo: Wikipedia, via]]]> Hunter Walker 2008-06-17T15:00:01-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2008/3/13/84757/8648

You probably already know to stick to bottled water when traveling in developing nations. But a recent outbreak of typhoid in the Philippines is really driving this home. Over 2,000 people in a city just 30 miles outside of Manila have become seriously ill, and it's a nasty bug.

According to the World Health Organization, typhoid symptoms include high fever, malaise, headache and rose-colored spots on the chest. Typhoid is a bacterial disease caused by ingesting food or drink contaminated by the feces or urine of infected people. So now you're wondering, how does that get into the water supply? Blame it on the weather, says a WHO official:

Flooding during the wet season and typhoons cause open sewerage drains to spill, enabling effluent to seep into wells and water pipes and spread diarrhea-causing diseases such as gastroenteritis and cholera.

Make sure to look out for tap water in its other, commonly-overlooked form: ice in your drink. Play it safe by brushing your teeth with bottled water as well. And if you want to be really cautious, you should just drink beer the entire trip.

Related Stories:
· Philippines Typhoid Outbreak Sparks Probe [Bloomberg]
· Travel Safety coverage [Jaunted]
· Asia Travel coverage [Jaunted]

[Photo: 96dpi]]]> benh 2008-03-13T13:00:01-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2008/3/11/74857/2648

Skiing might sound like an invigorating winter vacation pastime, but some think it's got a dangerous side. Judging by the photos in a Times report out of the UK over the weekend, it's true. They put together a special about ski breaks of a different sort: those in holidaymakers bones.

As well as showing a neat collection of x-rays, the newspaper drew on the info at a website called ski-injury.com, which collates data about ski accidents in Scotland. What worried us the most was that it's not those risk-taking advanced skiers that are most likely to break a bone--it's beginners.

For skiers, the most common damage to do to yourself is injuring a knee, with the head and shoulders also taking a beating. Snowboarders face different dangers, with 25 percent of their injuries being to wrists.

On an across-the-world basis, winter sport enthusiasts will be happy to hear that skiing and snowboarding are really relatively safe. A skier would have to ride for around 1,000 days--nearly three years non-stop--to guarantee an injury, and snowboarders--depending on whose stats you believe--can go 500 days between incidents. The good news is that whichever stats you manipulate, it sure ain't as dangerous as Mom said, so get out there and hit the slopes.

Related Stories:
· Ski Breaks: The X-Ray Stories [UK Times]
· Skiing coverage [Jaunted]
· Ski Areas Near Airports Map [Jaunted]

[Photo: gojumeister]]]> amandak 2008-03-11T09:30:01-05:00 Search Jaunted string http://www.jaunted.com/search/