I love looking at maps. Especially maps with aircraft routes. I love trying to trace the lines between cities to figure out from which cities do the flights to a given city originate.
I found this beautiful world map showing the current United airlines international routes. It is a beautifully laid out map with very well laid out routes shown. Check it out…

I could not help but notice a few things (This map only shows international routes):
Latin American routes: Continental had a formidable presence in South and Central America. Look at …

I do not fly US Airways often. United is my primary domestic carrier of choice and living with a United hub as my local airport (IAD), it ends up having the most likely flight available. That is except when I am flying to Charlotte, an airport ‘owned’ by US Airways. I flew there earlier this week. Quick day trip. And I remain unimpressed…

Seats: US Airways must have the smallest pitch of the industry. I am not tall and my knees were touching the seat in front of me. What would …

I have been traveling. I will post an article on my recent travel soon. I did write some on the flights, but the posts are still in outline form. Got some work to do. In the meanwhile, the world did not stop and things have been going on in the past few days. Here are a few tidbits.
1. Lufthansa shares its seating layout for the 747-8i:
Lufthansa is the first airline to fly the Boeing 747-8i. It will be referred to as the 74H in the 3-character mode of referring to …

As I blogged a couple of weeks ago, I just redeemed 480,000 United miles for four business class tickets to India. My mileage balance has now fallen below 200,000 miles. This has left a deep desire in my mind to ramp up some miles! With the large balance I had, I had started taking it easy and had been focussed on other programs and credit cards with points like Chase Sapphire. It is back to getting UNited miles now.
Here is what I have been doing:
Applied for the new United MileagePlus® …

United has been beaten up bad on its absolutely pathetic boarding process. Just the sheer number of comments I got on my last post on this topic (32 at the time of writing this) is telling. They have turned what used to be an orderly and efficient boarding process into a cattle call, where the only way you did not get boarded ‘first’ was if you did not have a United MileagePlus number.
Well, they seem to have noticed that we hate it. In an email I got today that was …

By no way does this mean that a merger is sure to happen, but the unions of bankrupt American Airlines have decided to support a potential merger with US Airways. US Airways’ CEO has been hinting on a possible merger for some time now. The unions are backing this because AA is in trouble. As it went into bankruptcy, they announced 13,000 job cuts! A merger with US Airways could be a path to safety for AA.
US Airways itself came to be in its current form thru a merger. The …

As I have blogged before, I have accumulated over a million miles over the years. I have collected these miles by flying, with credit cards and lots of free miles from various sources. I actually have never flown more than 60,000 miles in a any year (I am the ‘unroadwarrior’, after all). Most years I barely fly 35,000 to 40,000 in a typical year. Accumulating these miles took several years. So, redeeming 480,000 of them in just one go was painful.

I redeemed the miles for four seats in business class …

In my last post I wrote about earning a minimum of 500 miles for flights taken. This prompted a question from a reader – what is this minimum miles you speak of? Well, here is the answer.
Airlines award miles for flights based on the miles flown. For flights that are very short – less than 500 miles, most airlines award at least 500 miles. This is known as minimum miles award. Different airlines have different rules as to when they would award these minimum miles. Some airlines give them to …

I have to fly US Airways every once in a while. Going in and out of Charlotte (CLT), which I do every so often, forces one to do so. One of my peeves with US Airways (amongst several others), is that when earning miles on United, I would not earn a 500 minimum miles. Dulles (IAD) to Charlotte is 321 miles. United stopped giving the 500 minimum to even it’s Elites a few years ago and only awards the actual miles earned. Continental, on the other hand always gave the …

Emirates is one of the best airlines in the world – see my earlier review of Emirates. They and their main rival Etihad have just announced non-stop daily service from its hub in Dubai to Washington, DC (DXB-IAD). This is great news. The third major middle-east airline – Qatar, already operates a daily non-stop to DC. Good to see these great airlines come to IAD. This is also good competition for United as it already has non-stop service to Dubai and one-stop to Abu Dhabi (AUH), Etihad’s hub, and Doha …