How to allow cellphones in flight - Air France

What kind of seat would you like? Smoking or nonsmoking? Cell-phone or non-cell-phone? Seated or standing harnessed to a board?. Many peoples worst fears are coming true: Cellphones will be legal on selected Air France flights. Using technology from On Air, Air France will outfit a single Airbus 318, set for delivery, with equipment allowing customers to use their phones in flight.

 

Air New Zealand flight status schedules and check in

How is the easiest way to know the Air New Zealand flight status, particularly about Schedules and also check in? To find out the flight status, please go to the official website of Air New Zealand, there is some very important menus, such as;

• Arrivals and Departures 
• Flight Schedules
• Route Maps

5 Small Things That I Appreciated While Traveling Today

In praise of small stuff - The woman next to me on my flight this afternoon really bugged me. Her “crime” was minor, but it really irked me today: She found reason to complain about the slightest things, enough to almost make me pity the airline.

5 ways to get an edge over other air travelers

Most travelers at the airport, the recording head and allow the airline to take care of the rest. This is not good enough. Especially if any chose goes wrong and that things go wrong. You must be your own lawyer, and you need a game plan, with information and technology backup.

Air New Zealand considering sleeping pods in flight

How exactly would this work for take off and landing? Strapped into your bunk? Seems like casualties would be higher in a crash, too. Not to be outdone by Lufthansa’s recently-floated but still very much tentative proposal to create a bunk-bed cabin in economy class, Air New Zealand is reportedly considering an alternative economy-class sleeper configuration. “Sleeping pods.”
 
 

Air Canada opens ALL seats to frequent flyer redemption

Award availability has been the Achilles’ heel of frequent flyer programs for some time. But in a remarkable change of pace, Air Canada announced this week that it would open *all* available seats on its flights to its Aeroplan members for point redemption by the end of the year. Already the airline claims to leave 15% of its seats open for frequent flyer redemptions.

Air Canada’s new menu of fare options

Back in April, Air Canada introduced $20 discount for passengers who agreed 1) not to make any changes to their itinerary and 2) not to check any luggage.

Now, the airline is expanding the “Go Discount” program, making the calculation of your airfare even more a la carte:

 

Air Canada’s all you can eat fares

Like flying? A lot? Really, really a lot? Like Canada? Like the idea of going through American immigration in Canada? Have I got a deal for you.

 

Air Canada is rolling out all-you-can-fly fare passes for 3 and 6-month periods. The fares aren’t cheap, per se (fares start at ~$1700 per month), but if you commute between the US and Canada on a regular basis, this could be up your alley.

 

Backlog roundup: Skybus flies, directors shoot, curry explodes, TSA moonlights, and much more

It’s been a tough few weeks, so the posting machine has been running a bit slow. Time to clear some of the backlog:

Survivor: Skybus edition
Jaunted’s Mark Johnson played anthropologist in the airline world last week, doing some participant-observation onboard ultra-cheap negative-frills airline Skybus. The whole saga, with videos and pictures, can be found here. Photo above is Mark’s pic of a $9/hour Skybus flight attendant selling goods (on commission). Ah, the ubiquitous Toblerone, official chocolate of 35,000 feet. But ice wine? And those crew uniforms look remarkably like the folks in those hotels TV ads…

Singapore Airlines - Such a long flight, it’s not really a trans-Pacific route any more

In recent years, there has been abundant competition for travelers business class on the road to the crossing of the Atlantic, with upstarts carve out niches all-business class to seduce passengers far major airlines. But so far, there was no such movement on transpacific routes.

But it has not reached that is offering this new service. It is Singapore Airlines.

If running late, don’t land your private aircraft at a golf course

We’ve all been there. Running late for a meeting, perhaps stuck in traffic, and you wish you could just fly to your destination. (Skipping the TSA shoe-scanning frisk-a-thon, of course.) But leave it to an overzealous parent to make the dream a reality.

This is parenting in 2016: Your child is late for tennis practice. So you fly your personal plane, land it — on skis, mind you, since this is a northern suburb of Chicago, and the ground is covered in snow — illegally on a golf course, and hope no one notices. Like a modern-day Charles Lindbergh, you heroically fly in, delivering your offspring to an informal practice, scheduled before team tryouts later in the week. Seriously.

A Lake Villa man hopped in his Piper Clipper airplane Saturday, breezed above the congested roads and landed at a golf course across a highway from the tennis club, where skis on the underside of his four-seater glided across the snow-covered fairway.

Police received worried calls about a plane circling twice, then touching down at the Crane’s Landing golf course at the Marriott Lincolnshire Resort. Officials thought they might have a crash, with victims to attend to. Instead, they found Robert Kadera, 65, and his 14-year-old son trudging through the snow, Prince racket and a bag of tennis balls in hand. They had parked on the 7th fairway, just 20 feet south of the retaining wall for Illinois Highway 22.

At least he stayed out of the sand trap.
Nice piloting, admittedly. Spoiled child, clearly. Obnoxious parent, most definitely. Who thinks it’s okay to land a plane on someone else’s property — without requesting permission — just so your son can make it to tennis practice? Great lesson to be teaching the kids.

Parachuting in would have been a completely different matter. (Sidebar: I’ve been on that road in Lincolnshire. There’s a great, classic miniature golf course practically around the corner: Par-King. Highly recommended.)

Anti-jet-lag hotels?

What if you could arrive in a distant location and yet be assured that you wouldn’t suffer from miserable jet lag? Pipe dreaming, perhaps. But it’s encouraging that hotel chains are working to help travelers in getting on the right time zone quickly and comfortably. For example:

Westin has partnered with Philips and a group of sleep doctors to create a “concept room” aimed at aiding sleep deprivation and cutting jet-lag recovery time in half. This hotel-room laboratory is currently being tested at the Westin Chicago River North.