Airline and Airport News
To meet the challenges of airport congestion and to improve passengers' boarding experience, Delta Airlines says it is experimenting with a new approach at its Atlanta hub.
Delta says the changes are designed to streamline the boarding process and will get a tryout at three gates on the T Concourse at Atlanta's Hartsfield Jackson Airport.
First, the check-in counters are getting smaller. Mobile agent pods will have a smaller footprint than traditional gate counters, which...
Nothing annoys air travelers quite so much as arriving at their destination only to get stuck waiting at baggage claim for luggage that never comes. While airline companies are constantly striving to reduce the amount of lost or delayed luggage, many are also looking into ways of promptly notifying customers when something goes wrong.
Yesterday, American Airlines announced that it will be doing just that with the introduction of its Customer Baggage Notification (CBN) sy...
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The airline industry has gone through some changes as of late, the most notable being the inclusion of a “basic economy fare.” While Southwest recently derided the fare as being a “huge mistake,” companies like Delta, United, and American Airlines have all jumped on the bandwagon.
Now, American has announced an update to its boarding process that will take the new fare into account. The company says that starting March 1, boarding groups will no longer be called by their...
Thomas Demetrio, attorney for Dr. David Dao, the United Airlines passenger forcibly removed from a flight Sunday, has laid out his case against the airline.
At a news conference in Chicago, Demetrio accused United, and airlines generally, of "bullying" their customers. But he said the case of his client, the subject of a video that by now may have been viewed by everyone in the world, goes beyond the pale.
Demetrio told assembled media representatives that the case is a s...
The outrage directed against United Airlines' handling of Dr. David Dao, on a flight from Chicago to Louisville, has been building for nearly a week.
On Sunday, Dao refused to give up his seat to a United Airlines employee who needed to get to Louisville, and his attorney says he was severely injured when security personnel dragged him off the plane in front of dozens of smartphone-wielding passengers who recorded the incident and spread it around the world.
In a news con...
United Airlines' costly public relations disaster has caused several airlines to re-evaluate policies on how they deal with passengers, according to various published reports citing internal company memos.
Notably, United took the first step, reportedly advising company employees that they are not to involuntarily remove a ticketed passenger to provide room for a United employee in the future.
That's what happened eight days ago, when a 69-year old physician was forcibly ...
Travel between the U.S. and Europe isn't exactly cheap. That is, unless you get booked on one of Norwegian Air's newly-approved flights between the U.S. and Ireland and the UK, for $65 one-way.
The Trump administration has given the green light for the low fares after a protracted political battle. The application, which the Obama administration called one of the most complicated ever, was bitterly opposed within the airline industry and took three years to complete. The...
Delta Airlines and its customers had a nightmarish weekend, a holdover from the severe weather that battered the Southeast during the middle of last week.
Flight cancellations continued to affect operations through the weekend. The company said things are beginning to stabliize, but it reported that flight crew availability continued to hamper operations because not enough people were within the federally mandated crew rest and duty day guidelines.
"We know this is extrem...
Just two weeks after United Airlines set off a social media firestorm by forcibly removing a passenger from a flight, American Airlines finds itself in damage control mode as well.
According to several passengers who were in the process of boarding American Airlines Flight 591 at San Francisco, a male flight attendant grabbed a stroller from a female passenger who was in the process of boarding, while holding her small child.
According to witnesses, the flight attendant t...
Nobody likes being delayed or late, especially travelers that have to make connecting flights in other cities. But worry not! United Airlines will be guaranteeing on-time arrivals for its future customers. . . well, for a select few of its customers, anyway.
The company has announced a new reliability guarantee for its business and corporate travelers, saying that it will get them to their destinations on time. If it isn't able to follow through on this promise, these tr...
Airline safety is vastly improved since man first took to the skies. Crashes claiming multiple lives, while not everyday occurrences, were not uncommon either.
Over the years, the air transport industry learned valuable lessons from every accident.
By the late 1990s, airline safety showed vast improvements, by virtue of better equipment and better training. Now, an air disaster within the U.S. is very rare.
But that's not to say there aren't plenty of close calls. What wor...
Air travelers, it appears, were a pretty content bunch in early spring.
According to the Department of Transportation's (DOT) Air Travel Consumer Report there were just 1,122 complaints about service from consumers -- down 21.5% from a month earlier and off 20.9% from the same month the year before.
The carriers posted an on-time arrival rate of 84.5%, an improvement from March's 81.5% mark and April 2015's 81.8% on-time rate. As far as cancellations go, just 0.9% of sche...
With an improving economy, you can expect the nation's airports to be more crowded this spring.
Airlines For America (A4A), a trade group representing U.S. airlines, estimates 145 million passengers will fly on U.S.-based carriers between March 1 and April 30. That amounts to nearly 2.4 million a day and would represent a 4% increase over last year.
“There has never been a better time to fly, as evidenced by the record levels of traffic U.S. airlines saw in 2016 and will ...
The fatal attack at the Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., airport Friday has sparked new concerns about passenger safety, with passenger groups, TSA officers and lawmakers all calling for tighter security in non-secure areas -- the parts of airports that are accessible to the general public, which includes baggage claim areas in many airports.
Five people were killed and eight others wounded last week when a man opened fire in a baggage claim area. Authorities say a 26-year-old Ira...
At the beginning of the month, we reported the results of a study by New York’s Hunter College that assessed which airlines had the best food. While Virgin America took top honors, Delta Airlines came in a close second for its low-calorie and vegan options.
While having high marks on food quality is nice, many fliers today must pay extra for an in-flight meal if they’re flying coach and going on a long flight. However, Delta has recently said that it will be testing comp...
It might be a tumultuous Thanksgiving week for O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. Yesterday, labor leaders at the airport said that “hundreds” of low-wage workers voted to strike and may not show up this coming week, according to the Chicago Sun Times.
Around 2,000 non-unionized workers – including baggage handlers, security officers, caterers, and cleaners -- voted on the course of action in protest of unsafe working conditions, unpaid overtime, and retaliation ag...
If you're flying into American airspace anytime soon, make sure your phone, laptop and other devices all have fully charged batteries, because as of last weekend, you must add “any phone or laptop computer with a dead battery” to the list of “things you can't carry on an airplane, or else the Transportation Security Administration will think you're a terrorist.”
That list has been in flux since the TSA first invented it. Back in the summer of 2005, all small metal grooming tools, such as tweezers and nail clippers, were banned in carry-on luggage, then they were allowed again.
Shampoo, liquid soap and other toiletry gels were initially allowed, then briefly forbidden altogether, then re-allowed provided they were in labeled bottles or tubes each containing three ounces or less, although that limit has since increased so that today, you can have moisturizer, toothpaste and other personal-hygiene gels in bottles or tubes containing up to 3.4 ounces apiece. However, for terrorist-prevention reasons those individual bottles and tubes all must fit in a plastic resealable sandwich bag no larger than one quart.
All carry-on electronics were banned for a day or two after Christmas 2009, during which time the TSA also imposed a set of rules governing passenger behavior during the last hour of a flight: hands were to be visible at all times, nothing was to be kept in people's laps, no reaching into your pocket or carry-on bag, and no leaving your seat for any reason.
Those punitive restrictions were soon rescinded. One year later, in October 2010, the TSA started requiring fliers in American airspace to submit to what it calls “enhanced patdowns” -- the explicit genital-grabbing all-body searches which, as a TSA agent admitted at the time, were deliberately intended to intimidate fliers into walking through the TSA's then-new full-body scanners instead.
And, of course, there have been the periodic TSA warnings against everything from shoes to cupcakes, all of which might, possibly, have the potential to be a bomb, or hide a bomb, or otherwise do something dangerous.
Old is new again
Hence the justification for the TSA's latest edict: if you are going to fly in American airspace and your cell phone has a dead battery (more specifically, if you show up with a device that cannot be turned on where a TSA agent can see it), they'll suspect the device is actually a disguised bomb, and then treat you as a suspect.
Hopefully, no terrorist or potential terrorist anywhere in the world is smart enough to disguise a bomb as an electronic device and then give it an actual working screen. But this possibility has already been considered and discarded by Jason Harrington, a former TSA agent who wrote in the Guardian that "the new airport cellphone rules wouldn't stop an iBomb" and warned that "the latest ad hoc security directive might actually make us less safe."
Those of a certain age may recall that this is actually not the first time the "turn on your devices" rule has been implemented. Long before there was a TSA -- back in the 1990s -- security guards at many U.S. airports used to ask travelers to turn on their laptops. Since this was in the Windows XP days, when a boot-up could take several minutes, it resulted in some pretty major back-ups and was eventually abandoned.
The story has generated many international headlines. For example: the U.K.'s Telegraph, on July 3, reported a “UK terror alert: body searches at British airports” with the subheading “New security regime imposed on passengers as American intelligence suggests al-Qaeda plot to use Western fanatics to bring down a US-bound plane.”
The next day, when the Express reported the news, it included warnings from a British travel agency, advising all travelers in the country to allow extra time for airport checks. The Express also said that the increased security measures were due to fears that terrorists might have an “undetectable 'stealth bomb'.”
"More like a physical assault"
Incidentally, both of those British news stories quoted an American tourist, Lisa Simeone, who was in Europe when local news reported the latest changes in American airport security rules. While Simeone and her husband were at Heathrow about to fly back home, a reporter strolling through the airport asked them what they thought about the new rules, and the Express said this:
American journalist Lisa Simeone, 57, said: “When I came through here last it was a cursory pat-down.
“This time it seems they are being a lot more aggressive and really groping people, it’s more like a physical assault.”
She said officials were swabbing belongings, clothes and shoes and even swabbed a baby’s pushchair.
No bombs or terrorists were found.
Simeone, a Baltimore resident and a frequent contributor to the TSA News Blog, is a frequent traveler who said she stopped flying in American airspace in 2010, when the TSA's “enhanced patdown” policy started.
“We used to travel a lot; it was a big part of my life,” Simeone said in a phone interview with ConsumerAffairs. The thought of never visiting Europe again made her rather depressed until she discovered that the Queen Mary 2 docks in New York and takes passengers across the Atlantic, so she and her husband got into the habit of driving from Baltimore to New York, taking the ship to Europe [it makes port calls in England and Germany], then flying back to the U.S.
“The QM2 is not expensive [compared to an airline ticket]; the problem is that it takes time,” Simeone said. A trans-Atlantic flight takes less than a day, whereas the Queen Mary 2 requires nearly a week to cross the ocean. “Not many Americans have enough time to take a vacation without flying.”
Latest American export
At any rate, Simeone and her husband said their vacation took three weeks in all, including the week they spent on the Queen Mary 2. Two and a half weeks into their vacation, Simeone learned, the TSA practices she sought to avoid in America had followed her to Europe.
“We were in Vienna, at the two and a half week mark, when the news reports started to come out: U.S. demanding other countries do this … I thought, 'Oh, my God, This is what's going on in the U.S., and now it's coming to Europe …. the U.S. makes an edict, and every other country knuckles under. They said the bomb they're looking for is 'undetectable,' but they think groping people will help them find it?”
A two-way ocean voyage from Europe to New York and back takes two weeks in all: as much vacation time as many Americans get in an entire year. “I work freelance, so I can take the time if I have to; my husband can't,” Simeone concluded glumly. She hopes the new regime in European airports proves only temporary, though fears that might be unduly optimistic: “The thing about civil liberties — once they're taken away, it's very unlikely you'll get them back.”
If you're flying into American airspace anytime soon, make sure your phone, laptop and other devices all have fully charged batteries, because as of last weekend, you must add “any phone or laptop computer with a dead battery” to the list of “things you can't carry on an airplane, or else the Transportation Security Administration will think you're a terrorist.”
That list has been in flux since the TSA first invented it. Back in the summer of 2005,...