Airlines Posts

A friend in DC just e-mailed this update to the Jetwhine news room.From the wastelands of New Mexico comes the news – no, Eclipse is fine, for now.This is certain to become THE news story of 2007, from the same state that brought you preside…

While Kate Hanni’s name may not ring a bell in everyone’s head immediately, it certainly should for anyone who flies aboard a commercial airliner this holiday travel season … or any other time of the year actually. Hanni was recen…

Now that Senator Dick Durbin (D)IL has demanded action from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Inspector General we can only hope acting FAA administrator Bobby Sturgell is listening.The problem at hand is not really a tough one and is s…

It’s been quite a busy few weeks for the webmaster at the Cessna Skycatcher blog since the Textron subsidiary announced its plan to assemble the C-162 in China. The blog has been the landing site for a number of heated comments poking hard at …

The Christmas season may be a bit barren this year for the people who work for United Airlines. Not of course the management folks. Somehow their piece of the pie never seems to come out damaged when things are tight. I was thinking more of the ra…

Some of you might recall a post from a few months back in which I expressed disdain that former ALPA president Duane Woerth had in a Letter to the Editor of the Washington Post, signed on to the same old tired airline/FAA line about what’s wro…

Southwest Airlines has again proven that running an airline – at least from a customer’s perspective – doesn’t need to simply fluctuate between chaos and more chaos.On the way back from the Blog World Expo conference in Las …

The National Transportation Safety Board met Thursday to talk about an industry epidemic … pilot fatigue. It’s about time. The Air Line Pilots Association folks were nice enough to let me write an article about fatigue in their magazine …

Jim Ott wrote an interesting article in last week’s Aviation Week and Space Technology called Surly Skies about … what else, airline travel.He said, “Any adaptation airlines make to counter the negatives of air travel seem to be u…

NASA’s administrator Michael Griffin said he made a mistake the other day and for many people that was enough. People do make mistakes and he said he was sorry.Griffin was answering demands from the public and the press about his agency’…

I have to admit I never gave this a thought before I read the story in the Times Online.Singapore Airlines, the first carrier to operate the Airbus A380, seems to have gone to great lengths to be sure that no one on board the massive aircraft is u…

I wonder how surprised the people at Bombardier actually were this weekend that SAS decided to permanently ground its fleet of 27 Q400 turboprops after a third landing gear accident in a month. The decision was announced Sunday as confidence in the …

The only thing I find surprising about the revelation that NASA has been sitting on a mountain of aviation safety data is that anyone is even remotely surprised about the way that agency operates.OK, maybe the fact that NASA sat on the data –…

John Carr’s blog – the Main Bang – posted an interesting piece the other day. He looked at pay scales for entry level controllers and found they will actually be paid less than janitors in Santa Clara County.But people still seem …

I’ve been really touched by how many regular readers noticed that Jetwhine just turned one.A year ago I had dinner with a buddy in Wichita who seriously questioned why I was trying to blend a little new media talk with the rest of the aviatio…

I heard an interesting interview on NPR last week with Richard Hurd from Cornell University. He said the use of labor strikes across the U.S. has declined by 90 percent since the 1970s.When Hurd began to focus on the Reagan Era, I expected to hear …

If I had to list things I would never have expected to see on Google Earth – the snappy video mapping software service run by the online giant – a flight simulator would probably be pretty high on the list.As you’ll read about at …

An airline pilot career has a few more thorns sticking out of it these days. Pay scales are down, duty days are longer, schedules stink and passengers are easily riled. But even with all that said, I still think it makes for a pretty incredible care…

News last week from the White House that even George Bush has finally run out of excuses to avoid admitting the U.S. aviation system is in need of serious reform should actually not come as much of a shock.The Business Travel Coalition’s chai…

If you click on this link, you’ll find yourself sitting smack dab in front of a FlightAware screen all tuned up to Day Jet’s online identity. This gives you the tools to follow all DayJet trips in near real time.Personally, I hope these…

Those Aviation Alliance Across America folks are at it again.They seem to think that industry types will take time out of their valuable day just to pick up the phone and punch in 866-908-5898 and be automatically connected to their members of Cong…

Just before FAA administrator turned off the lights to her office at 800 Independence Avenue last week, USA Today ran a story about a possible conflict of interest between Blakey, the FAA and the fat $1.8 billion contract awarded AIA member com…

One of the really annoying problems inherent in writing books like my recently published McGraw Hill volume – a Professional Pilot Career Guide – designed to answer every imaginable question about landing the best flying job since I knew…

Most people counted PATCO out years ago. PATCO was the union that represented air traffic controllers during the infamous 1981 strike that cost 12,000 PATCO members their jobs.But PATCO never really disappeared. It just shrank to become a tiny inde…