I love taking pictures of and flying in wide body aircraft. Sure beats an ERJ anyday! From a travel perspective, it’s all about comfort. The bigger planes are mode spacious, have higher ceilings, larger bins and in upper class, flat seats. Some narrow body aircraft do too, but they are few and far apart. As per taking pictures, I just love these big birds. They are engineering in flight! A marvel to look at, both in the air and on the ground.
Common wide body aircraft one gets to see are:
Boeing …

Skytrak announced its annual rankings for 2012. They rank all the airlines in the world by polling 18m airline cutovers around the world. And for the year 2012 (drumroll please) the top 10 airlines are:

Qatar Airways (Qatar) – No Alliance
Asiana Airlines (South Korea) – Star Alliance
Singapore Airlines (Singapore) – Star Alliance
Cathay Pacific (Hing Kong, China) – OneWorld
ANA (Japan) – Star Alliance
Etihad Airways (Bahrain) – No Alliance
Turkish Airlines (Turkey) – Star Alliance
Emirates (Dubai) – No Alliance
Thai Airways (Thailand) – Star Alliance
Malaysia Airlines (Malaysia) – OneWorld (Starting late-2012)

I am particularly impressed by …

A few years ago (four to be precise) my wife got one of them American Express Cards that gave her 50,000 Membership Rewards points just for signing up and spending $1,000 in a few months. When the year was up and the annual fee of over a hundred dollars was due, she decided it was not worth it to keep the card. As we all know vey well, Membership Rewards points would be been reduced to nil when she canceled the card. So we decided to transfer them out. Not …

Yeah, I know there are websites that will track it for me all in one place – I have accounts with points.com and gomilies.com , but they just don’t seem to be right or enough. … Staying at a hotel (duh, again, but this can become complex if one earns hotel points, airline miles or hotel points AND airline miles) Credit cards eMiles.com eRewards.com MyPoints.com TopGuest Car rentals (for rental rewards or airline miles) Other sundry events, like filling out a survey, earning miles as compensation for a customer service event, etc.

So, whether I am looking for cheap flights to Alicante (ALC) for an exotic vacation to Spain or to Charlotte, NC (CLT) for a day trip for work, my first preference is to fly on United and if they do not fly there (like to Alicante), pick another Star Alliance carrier (Spanair flies to ALC) or if no Star Alliance carrier goes there, pick another United partner. … Have one Primary airline, which is a part of a Global Airline If I had to pay a nominal fee or tax to consolidate accounts, I would do it (or pray for a merger.

As I was updating the spreadsheet I use to track my miles over the weekend, I happened to glance down at the bottom row, where I show a grand total of all my miles. It said 1,001,238. Cool! I wish it was bank balance that read that, but miles balance is a good start. I am no way anywhere near hard core road-warriors who travel over a million miles in a year (I am an UN-road-warrior, remember). Gary from View from the Wing just wrote a blog post about the …

Different airline have given their aircraft interesting livery for different reasons. They may add unique livery to:

Advertise – the Alliance they are a part of.
Promote – such as Alaska Airlines promoting Wildlife in Alaska or Continental promoting New York City a few years ago.
Advertise – like Southwest and the plane for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue
Show support for a home town – like US Airways has a Carolina Panthers aircraft
or just be unique.

There are many instances of airline painting their aircraft in unique schemes. Southwest has a plane painted up …

In the first three parts of this series on the Economics of Airline Miles I discussed: The Value of Airline Miles (Part I), The Value of Elite Status (Part II) and How to Maximize Airline Miles Earnings (Part III). In this fourth part of this ongoing series, I will go into the topic of how to effectively redeem your airline miles. Once you have earned all the miles by focussing your earnings, the eventual goal is to redeem these miles for rewards and awards from the airlines.
Remember, at the end …