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Delta Flight Lands On Atlanta Taxiway, Narrowly Avoids Disaster
You know what? Landing your airplane on an airport taxiway is not a good idea, even if you have a "medical emergency" onboard. This is exactly what happened at the consistently busy Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Airport on Monday, when a Delta flight inbound from Rio de Janeiro phoned in their emergency and then landed on the wrong stretch of tarmac.
Luckily for this plane and all the passengers on it, there were no other airplanes waiting on the taxiway to cause a collision, although there easily could have been what with Atlanta's congestion. The Delta flight should have landed on the runway, which is larger and longer and labelled as a runway, that sits parallel to the taxiway. Both the pilot and co-pilot have been relieved from flying while the investigation is pending; it's still not known what the medical emergency was. The FAA is concerned, and a spokewoman noted that "it was 'very, very rare' for a plane to land on a taxiway rather than the runway. 'None of us here, anecdotally, can remember this happening.'" Hopefully it won't happen again either.
Related Stories:
· Delta Flight Lands On Taxiway Instead Of Runway [AJC]
· Delta coverage [Jaunted]
[Photo: Jaunted]
Tags: Bad Ideas / ANA / Bathrooms / Toilets / Airline Fees / → All Tags
ANA Politely Requests You Pee Somewhere That's Not On Their Airplane
Among the many, many problems that arise out of Ryanair's ongoing success—they're up another 17% by the way—is that people start to think like Ryanair executives. Japanese airline ANA, perhaps inspired by the "we'll charge you for the bathroom" shenanigans of Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary, has taken to trying to regulate the urination of its passengers by urging them to pee before they board. This can't be for real, right?
Sounds like it is, though:
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Is Butt Comfort A Priority On Long Flights? The 'Skwoosh' Can Help
Do you have trouble "sitting down?" Does the thought of "bending your knees" or "getting in a chair" make you cringe? If so, then retailer TravelSmith might have the perfect travel gear accessory for you. The SKWOOSH Traveler Seat Pad is a brand new product that helps you accomplish, in the context of modern airports and airplanes, what humans have been doing unaided for the better part of 10,000 years.
In the category of "most offensive comfort travel gear," this nonsense isn't even close. And yet—and yet...
Travelers regularly spend hundreds of dollars to reduce their carry-on weight by mere ounces. There's an entire market in multitasking travel devices designed specifically for that purpose, and it moves billions of dollars per year. Meanwhile other people are carrying around portable seats to cover the chairs they're already sitting on? That seems unnecessary.
Tags: Bad Ideas / Ryanair / Airline News / Smoking / Smoking Bans / → All Tags
Ryanair Will Allow Smoking On Their Planes, If You Buy Their Brand
Well, we didn't have to wait very long for Ryanair to think up another crazy and controversial money-making scheme. Want to know what it is this time, now that they've already talked up paying to pee? Wait for it...wait for it...it's smoking on the plane!
That's right, one of the top behavioral rules of modern day air travel is being turned on its head by Ryanair, who are piloting the idea with their own brand of "Smokeless Cigarettes." What kind of crap are they trying to pull, exactly? Well, it seems that Ryanair took a survey of their passengers, according to USA Today, and found that some 24,000 professed an interest in smoking during flights. It did not however specify how many passengers were surveyed; 24,000 could be like a very low percentage, we have no idea.
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US Senate Votes To Allow Amtrak Passengers To Bring Guns Along
The United States Senate, in a ringing endorsement of the 2nd Amendment or something, has taken the bold stance that passengers riding on trains should be allowed to transport handguns as checked baggage. Apparently everything else has been taken care of, so they had time to get to this:
The Senate voted Wednesday to permit passengers on the Amtrak passenger railroad to transport handguns in their checked baggage... 'Americans should not have their Second Amendment rights restricted for any reason, particularly if they choose to travel on America's federally subsidized rail line,' said Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., who made the proposal. Current Amtrak policy, put in place after the bombings of passenger trains in Madrid five years ago, prohibits weapons, including firearms, from being carried on its trains.
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Plonk Down $250 To Monitor Exactly How Many Calories You Burn Traveling
Ancient nutritionists who roamed the savanah eons ago discovered a mathematical formula for losing weight: eat less calories than you burn. A few million years later, their descendants amended the formula: eat less calories than you burn, but don't assume you're burning much more than 2,000 calories per day because you're not. If the average person exercises really hard they can bump their calorie burning from 2,000 to 2,500 per day - roughly one extra soft drink with dinner. So mostly the magic secret to weight lose is to stop counting calories and just change your diet.
Or, alternatively, you could pay $250 for the bodybugg State-of-the-Art Calorie Management System, a web-enabled wristband that uses specialized sensors to monitor how many calories you're burning to 90% accuracy. It's a sedentary traveler's ultimate health device. Now you can know whether you burned 1,000 calories sitting on the plane or 1,010 calories, plus/minus 100 calories.
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US Senate Passes Bill Fining Tourists In The Name Of Tourism
On Wednesday the US Senate passed the Travel Promotion Act, which as a piece of legislation seems at least well-named. "Travel" is good. "Promotion" is usually at least interesting. So you'd think that this would be something positive. Yeah right:
Once signed into law, the Travel Promotion Act will create a public-private partnership with a budget of up to $200 million annually—funded by a $10 fee on foreign travelers from countries that do not pay for a visa to enter the United States—for the purpose of attracting international travelers to the United States.
Only our Congress could possibly pretend that the best way to promote tourism is by fining incoming tourists. More over, the bill doesn't so much promote US tourism as a certain kind of US tourism. The bill's original sponsors were the two Senators from Hawaii. The "bipartisan" label got slapped on after they were joined by Harry Reid, the Democratic Senator from Nevada, and John Ensign, the Repubublican Senator from Nevada. You begin to see where this is going.
Tags: Bad Ideas / Seatmates / Seats / Seating / In-Flight Comfort / Airline News / Airplanes / → All Tags
New Airplane Design Proposes Seating Passengers Face-To-Face
If British design company Design Q gets its way, airplanes of the future will seat passengers in an innovative—dare we say interactive—high-density configuration. More specifically, they intend to essentially seat passengers face to face for the entire trip:
A British design company says it is working on plans for new sideways, staggered seating on airplanes as a cost-cutting option for airlines to maximize the number of passengers on board. Design Q released images of the concept, which has a row of seats facing inward on each side of the plane and two rows running back-to-back down the middle of the aircraft.
Listen. We know that sometimes we can be a little harsh about the so-called "innovations" that so-called "experts" bring to the table. We've even been known to inappropriately dismiss a good idea or two, an overreaction we put down to years of travel having made us jaded. So we want to be very clear about this:
