Airlines Posts

MH370 Two Years Later: Has the Industry Changed?It’s anniversary time, but March 8 won’t be a happy day to reminisce.Two years ago, Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 (MH370), a Boeing 777, disappeared from the night skies over the South C…

To learn more about commercial drone operations, I recently attended a 4-hour introductory course for pilots conducted by Vortex UAS. The thorough presentation covered everything from history to the current legal landscape. What I did  not expect wa…

At United Airlines, does making money trump safety?A recent Aviation Week article quotes United CEO Jeff Smisek saying, “We’re going to run the airline for profit maximization …” That made me wonder a bit.Then I noticed la…

How Passengers Helped Mess Up Frequent Flyer ProgramsDear Reader / Listeners – You now have the option to listen to The Aviation Minute podcast or just read the script of the show below. If you receive Jetwhine via e-mail, you can click here …

Why is Regional Airline Pay So Bad?Dear Reader / Listeners – You now have the option to listen to The Aviation Minute podcast or just read the text of the show below. If you receive Jetwhine via e-mail, you can click here to listen as well.I…

Given the recent reports of job growth and the enduring discussions about pilot shortages, I moseyed over to the Bureau of Labor Statistics to see which occupations are ascending and which are in decline and where airline pilots show up on that spec…

FAA rules alone won’t prevent a drone-jet collisionBy Robert P. Mark, reprinted from The Chicago Tribune, December 25, 2014(Photo -Terrence Antonio James, Chicago Tribune)This holiday season, one of the hottest-selling toys has been the qua…

Directed my way by a leader familiar with my connection to aviation, an Eagle Scout e-mailed me this question: “I want to become an airline pilot when I get older and I’d like to know where to start? What things can I do as a high schoo…

Drones in the NewsWhen I was a kid my mom told me she could always tell when I was hiding something … “It shows all over your face,” she’d say.No one, not even me, believes drones this size are a threat. So what does this…

Dear Reader / Listeners – You now have the option to listen to The Aviation Minute podcast or read the text below. If you receive Jetwhine via e-mail, you can click here to listen as well.At the risk of droning on about a topic my pals David…

Dear Reader / Listeners – You now have the option to listen to the Aviation Minute podcast or read the text below. If you receive Jetwhine via e-mail, you can click here to listen as well.Time to Give ATC an “Atta Boy”Most aviat…

There are many ways to look at the recent spate of passenger confrontations resulting from one reclining into the knees and face of another. The confrontations have been occurring for years, ever since the airline MBAs started shrinking the seat pi…

AP photo of the MH17 site in eastern UkraineThe trouble with an aircraft accident that happens on the other side of the world for we Americans, especially one that occurs in a battle zone, is understanding which source speaks the truth about what&#…

I had an opportunity to visit the normally closed-to-the-public NTSB Training Center near Leesburg Virginia a few weeks ago as a guest of director Paul Schuda assisted by Senior Air Safety Investigator Bill English.To say my visit was eye opening w…

Fresh evidence has been uncovered in the disappearance of Malaysian flight 370 (MH370) according to The Telegraph of London. To date, there hasn’t been one single shred of physical evidence that proves any of the dozen or so theories about wh…

First let’s talk a little reality … Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), or drones as most of us refer to them are coming … and they’re coming soon. That’s not necessarily all bad though. Drones can operate in places that are…

Memorial Day here in the United States is one of the days we remember all the men and women who served and perished in armed conflicts around the world since our own Civil War in the mid-1800s.The stories emerging about how poorly we treat these me…

A recent New York Times story, “Air Travel Economics Make Midsize Hubs Unprofitable“, explained why airline travel today often demands long drives to the nearest major airline hub. This withdrawal of service from outlying communities and…

I like hanging around with other flight instructors. Not only do they understand how an airplane flies, but they also know the intricacies of those dark corners of a flight envelope … things that can lead a new pilot down a rabbit hole of trou…

When my wife and I were married a long time ago, we promised ourselves that if we ever had kids and wanted to travel on an airplane, we’d just fork over the extra money for a ticket. To us, the risk of injury should they fly out of our hands d…

More than it has in the previous two years I’ve judged an airport writing contest, fear was a central theme in the nearly three dozen essays submitted by students in elementary, middle, and high school. Most of them addressed airline flights …

When the FAA tells you they’re changing the way they conduct business because they want to be more fair to someone, or that they want to save money, it’s probably time to duck. You can pretty much be sure that whatever they have in mind …

I can’t believe I’m going to say something nice about the TSA again. That’s twice in a couple of months.I do think it’s worth mentioning that the TSA has actually created a product with value in their new TSA PreCheck card, …

While it may seem to many of you as if the Malaysian Airlines 370 story has been going on forever, we’re really only into the opening scenes of this investigation. Remember it took two years to recover the data recorders from Air France 447.L…