The OTR’s Offices will be closed on Friday for a staff retreat in New Orleans.
In the meantime, do yourself a favor and read this week’s Ask the Pilot column in Salon.  This will make no sense whatsoever, but it’s about Dakar’s airport, poverty, and a hedgehog.  It’s a really wonderful piece of travel writing.
Have a [...]

(Thanks, Channel 9):
Today is the last day to get $30 off your next JetBlue flight.  Enter code JetOct08 when you check out.  The discount is good for flights October 23rd through December 15th (minus Thanksgiving).

A drunk passenger on a Turkish Airlines flight from Antalya, Turkey, to St. Petersburg gave a note to flight attendants saying he was hijacking the plane with a bomb. Turns out he was only joking, which is generally frowned upon.  Passengers on the plane confronted the man and discovered he did not have any weapons [...]

(Thanks, Airliners…)
A TSA screener at Newark Airport was accused of stealing more than 100 items from passengers’ luggage at the airport and selling some of it on eBay (you can see his great feedback here).  He was caught when he stole a nearly $50,000 camera belonging to CNN and in a very, very bold move, [...]

If you don’t care about airlines in India, feel free to skip ahead…
The Indian airline industry has seen a massive amount of consolidation over the past couple of years, and that strategy continued today with Jet Airways and Kingfisher agreeing to an alliance that will control 60% of the domestic market.  The past couple of [...]

I thought I’d pass along an interesting article about what’s happening with the US Airways and Delta Shuttles (as you might have guessed, what’s happening isn’t good).  The short version is that Wall Street misery + Acela = mess.  During the first half of the year, some months saw load factors in the 36% range [...]

Norhtwest announced that it will drop nonstop flights between Hartford and Amsterdam for the usual economic reasons (they’re also dropping nonstops from Detroit to Dusseldorf and suspending Minneapolis-Paris for the winter).  I really only bring this up because one of the arguements for the Boeing 787 was that it would allow airlines to fly mid-haul [...]

2 moderate profile international flight suspensions I thought I’d pass along:
Air France will cancel its nonstop service from LAX to London Heathrow - without any major SkyTeam hub on either end, and quite a bit of competition, it was a non-starter.  Instead, it will fly a codeshare with Delta from London Heathrow to JFK, essentially [...]

After I gave a hot tip that porn-viewers should fly American instead of Delta because of their more lax in-air-porn-viewing policies, American has gone and pulled the plug (so to speak?) on in-flight porn - the airline will filter adult content from its in-flight wi-fi.

The AP is reporting that American Airlines will move to an a la carte pricing model in 2009, mirroring the pricing scheme that Air Canada has had in place for about 5 years.  You will complain initially, but in the end you will agree with me that it’s the best option.  The short version is [...]