An Air France plane skidded off the runway after landing in Toronto and caught fire around 4pm Eastern. Early reports are that most passengers are safe, but this is not yet certain. Thoughts and hopes are with the passengers and crew.

Update: Everyone made it out alive, with just a few injuries.

The alleged incident occurred on a flight from DC to Syracuse, and the guy denies it.

Story contains one of the best lines ever in a news article:

When he got off the plane in Syracuse, police took him into custody and checked to see if he was wearing underpants, which he was, Gibeau said.

But I don’t think this is actually illegal:

Police searched Gibeau and found five Polaroid photos of his penis, according to Bragg’s affidavit. Gibeau said he was bringing the photos to his girlfriend to show her the contrast between the sunburned areas of his body and the areas that weren’t exposed on the beach.

A piece in the Seattle Times explains that State Department travel warnings, which harm tourism in the country on the receiving end, are influenced by political considerations. (I’m shocked!)

Noting that the State Department’s treatment of London bombings were delayed, contained scant detail and provided warning for just a few hours, when less serious country warnings don’t expire for months

Jim Grace, CEO of InsureMyTrip.com, an online seller of travel insurance, puts it, “if the State Department issues a travel warning, Tony Blair would be on the phone to President Bush pretty quickly, saying ‘Hey, what are you doing to our economy? We’re supposed to be best allies.’ ”

Of course the State Department denies this, and simply claims to be incompetent instead

“We are a bureaucracy and unfortunately these things don’t always happen as quickly as one might hope.”

I think I’ve seen this play somewhere before…

Captain Renault: I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!

[a croupier hands Renault a pile of money]


Croupier: Your winnings, sir.


Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.

…

Captain Renault: This is the end of the chase.


Rick: Twenty thousand francs says it isn’t.


Captain Renault: Is that a serious offer?


Rick: I just paid out twenty. I’d like to get it back.


Captain Renault: Make it ten. I’m only a poor corrupt official.

Round up the usual suspects!

The thirty-minute no pee rule at Reagan National has been repealed.

David Rowell notes in his latest weekly email that Florida has settled with 23 hotels that were accused of price gouging during last year’s hurricane season.

At One hotel in particular

the daily rate for rooms at the motel increased from $55 per night to $75 and, in some instances, $100 per night.

As a result

the Airport Inn will provide restitution to guests affected by the price gouging practices, many of whom were over age 60.

(I’m not sure why being 60 years old makes paying $75 for a hotel night especially problematic?)

I addressed this issue when it came up last year:

Via Chris Elliott, Florida’s attorney general filed complaints against two hotels for price gouging in the aftermath of Hurricane Charley.

The attorney general has issued a press release to let voters know he’s fighting evil, greedy corporations.

“Hurricane Charley is the worst natural disaster to befall our state in a dozen years, and it is unthinkable that anyone would try to take advantage of neighbors at a time like this. We are taking a two-pronged approach to fight this egregious behavior, ” said Crist. “Families putting their lives back together should not have to worry about price gouging.”

The conduct in question is a Days Inn charging $109 for a room when a billboard advertised $50 rooms, and a Crossroads Motor Lodge charging $61.27 (including all taxes and fees) rather than $44.79.

My blood doesn’t really boil at $109 hotel nights, even when it’s for an airport Days Inn. While there may be an advertised teaser rate of $50, the cheapest rate over a range of dates on the Days Inn website and on Expedia is $62.99, although I also found a pre-paid rate at Res99.com for $55.99 – along with a “DAYS INN ROCK BOTTOM RATE PROMOTIONAL RATE” of $71.99 and a “Standard Rate” (presumably rack) of $79.99.

The complainant indicates that they were renting one of the last rooms at the hotel, and the rates charged are presumably within the maximum posted daily rate for the property (that absurd room rate printed on the back of your hotel room door). Naturally the last rooms available at a property fetch a higher price, hotels and airlines refer to this as ‘yield management’ and economists call this allocating scarce resources to their highest valued use.

The Florida Attorney General outlines the details of Florida’s anti-gouging rule:

Florida’s price gouging statute requires that the cost of necessities like food and water must remain at the price that was average during the 30 days immediately preceding a major storm like Hurricane Charley.

I’m not even sure what it would mean to determine average prices for a 30 day period preceding an emergency. Hotels do calculate average daily room rates, but on any given day the price that any traveler will pay varies substantially. Would the Florida statute require not just avoiding price increases, but setting the mean price as the price ceiling for the duration of the declared emergency?

This seems an absurd conclusion given the industry’s status quo pricing practices, and an offensive one on basic freedom grounds. Thus I take umbrage with Chris Elliott who encourages readers to file complaints with the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. Though I don’t take too much umbrage because there’s something cool about sending such a complaint to Florida’s Commussioner of Agriculture, one Charles Bronson.

Tyler Cowen offered some interesting thoughts on why we don’t see more price gouging after Hurricane Isabel last year.

Watch what you say. Don’t make fun of the law, or joke that you might be breaking the law. An air marshall might be listening.

Apparently an air marshall overhead some men on a plane talking about having crossed into the U.S. illegally so he had the plane met and the men taken into custody.

Some might say: great, law enforcement is present and acting against criminal activity.

I’m actually frightened by this, on several levels.

The expansion of law enforcement in our midst has been accepted as a way of fighting terrorism (though it’s unclear this particular method is effective in that fight). Now, once in under the cover of fear of terrorism, law enforcement has far greater access to our conversations by simple virtue of being closer to those conversations in daily life (not to mention more extensive searches, which have been used in questionable drug arrests).

Law enforcement officers no doubt are charged with enforcing laws rather than ignoring violations of law. And my own personal opinions of immigration law notwithstanding, most Americans would presumably like to see greater crackdown on violations of law rather than not. But the societal monitoring that is now taking place scares me, it really does.

Jameson Inns, which owns 123 economy properties in 13 states, is offering stock as a frequent guest perk. Three million shares have been registered with the SEC for this purpose.

Guests who enroll in the program would have 10 percent of their room charges credited toward the purchase of Jameson stock, now trading near $2.50 a share.



Shares will be provided through a designated broker or the company, based on the average closing price for the last five trading days of each month. Customers won’t pay commissions on shares they receive, but will pay fees on shares they sell.

(Hat tip to the MilesLink newsletter.)

When distribution of funds for homeland security is done politically, as pork (the system we have now, more or less), you get farces like this one.

Kentucky’s large rural population prompted program coordinators to center this exercise around agriculture. Likewise, he said since Kentucky is one of the nation’s top five goat-producing states, setting the attack at a goat show seemed plausible.



The goats “have been infected with a bio-agent. … Then, the infected goats are at the show and you have people come and look at the goats and pet the goats and then they go home,” Cline said, summarizing the day’s scenario.



“We try to focus on what really matters to Kentucky,” he said, adding, “this is a perfect way to do it.”

Via David Rowell,

280 fully armed soldiers boarded a chartered DC10 to fly from Atlanta to Kuwait. M-16s, pistols, bayonets and knives were everywhere. But, as the soldiers made their way through airport security, they had to surrender nose hair clippers, pocket knives and cigarette lighters.

The federal government spent billions of dollars on screening devices that didn’t work when it took over airport security. It didn’t make us any safer, but it made us feel safer

“After 9/11, we had to show how committed we were by spending hugely greater amounts of money than ever before, as rapidly as possible,” said Representative Christopher Cox, a California Republican who is the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee. “That brought us what we might expect, which is some expensive mistakes. This has been the difficult learning curve of the new discipline known as homeland security.”

How bad are the screening systems?

Customs officials at Newark have nicknamed the devices “dumb sensors,” because they cannot discern the source of the radiation. That means benign items that naturally emit radioactivity – including cat litter, ceramic tile, granite, porcelain toilets, even bananas – can set off the monitors.



Alarms occurred so frequently when the monitors were first installed that customs officials turned down their sensitivity. But that increased the risk that a real threat, like the highly enriched uranium used in nuclear bombs, could go undetected because it emits only a small amount of radiation or perhaps none if it is intentionally shielded.

…

The port’s follow-up system, handheld devices that are supposed to determine what set off an alarm, is also seriously flawed. Tests conducted in 2003 by Los Alamos National Laboratory found that the handheld machines, designed to be used in labs, produced a false positive or a false negative more than half the time. The machines were the least reliable in identifying the most dangerous materials, the tests showed.

…

The Transportation Security Administration bought 1,344 machines costing more than $1 million each to search for explosives in checked bags by examining the density of objects inside. But innocuous items as varied as Yorkshire pudding and shampoo bottles, which happen to have a density similar to certain explosives, can set off the machines, causing false alarms for 15 percent to 30 percent of all luggage, an agency official said. The frequent alarms require airports across the country to have extra screeners to examine these bags.

Now the government wants to go back to the drawing board and spend billions again.

Matt Lauer did a piece on the Today Show this morning (video clip) on the recent spate of travel pricing errors.

He mentions the USAirways $1.98 fare, the $55 Fiji trip, and the Lanesborough Hotel pricing error. He manages to hit key questions like whether airlines and hotels have to honor pricing, what role the internet plays in disseminating mistakes, and whether lists and websites promoting the errors are monitored by travel companies in order to correct errors more quickly.

The piece actually seems to be driving a bit of traffic to this website today. Mentioned in the interview are Flyertalk, FareAlert, and the New York Airfare Blog. Lots of people looking for similar sites are happening onto this one.

Via Tripso Daily, passengers are suing the Holland America cruise line because toilets overflowed during their trip and they saw crew members with prostitutes while in Ecuador.

The complaint says that it took several hours to clean up the mess from the toilets, and that there was a stench. If accurate, some sort of shipboard credit should have been offered.

Still, the compensated demanded seems a little much:

The Oltmans said they expected to be compensated by Holland America for pain and suffering, emotional distress, loss of earnings, legal fees and medical expenses, including a colonoscopy and hemorrhoid surgery, the lawsuit said.

(Emphasis mine.)

The IRS is apparently seeking to tax Latin American airlines for wages paid to flight attendants and pilots during the time they spend working over US airspace. (Link via Today in the Sky.)

Critics of the move point out that other countries might respond by doing the same to U.S. airlines.

Anyone with thoughts on why the IRS is focused on Latin American carriers — and not European or Asian carriers — feel free to offer them in them in the comments.

A state representative in Texas wants to ban sexy cheerleading.

Legislation filed by Rep. Al Edwards would put an end to “sexually suggestive” performances at athletic events and other extracurricular competitions.



“It’s just too sexually oriented, you know, the way they’re shaking their behinds and going on, breaking it down,” said Edwards, a 26-year veteran of the Texas House.

About the only redeeming thing in this idea is a middle-aged state legislator talking about young girls “shaking their behinds, breaking it down.”

Via Tripso Daily the San Jose Airport Commission has voted to recommend to the city council that airport rental car company employees be subject to the city’s ‘living wage’ rules.

The average wage for the 700 or so employees is reportedly $7.50 an hour. Under the city’s living wage policy, the workers would make a minimum of $11.11 without benefits, or $9.66 an hour with benefits.

The actual impact of minimum wage rules is always hard to predict. Increasing the minimum wage doesn’t always lead to unemployment as critics would suggest, often because the prevailing wage is already higher than the minimum wage. For instance, increasing the federal minimum wage to $6 wouldn’t have a tremendous impact on rental car employees at the airport, since their average wage is already more than that.

At the same time, minimum wage rules often change who is employed. Higher wages often mean that companies are keeping for more productive employees, especially when an employer is subject to wage rules that surrounding businesses are not. If airport rental companies have to pay a higher minimum wage than other San Jose businesses, they’ll attract more job applicants and skim the cream of the labor pool crop. That comes at a cost to workers in the existing lower wage pool.

(This understanding was put into practice in South Africa under apartheid, where minimum wage rules were used to reduce black employment and transfer jobs to White Europeans.)

The living wage policy could cost rental car companies $6 million to $12 million a year, and the companies are looking at moving off-site outside the rule’s jurisdiction. Not mentioned in the article, some companies may leave the market. That change could allow higher rental car prices to prevail, fewer cars rented, fewer people employed, and any number of other results.

Still, predictions of doom may not come true at all, especially in a growing economy where the prevailing wage may well reach the level of any mandated increase.

What I find most bizarre is how this rule is applied:

In 1998, San Jose became one of the first Bay Area communities to establish a living wage policy.



The general philosophy at the time was that the living-wage policy would cover private companies working under city contracts for which the city could potentially assume responsibility itself, Mr. Manheim says.



As a result, the airport’s restaurant workers and retail store employees are covered by the city’s living-wage policy while car rental employees, taxi drivers and airport shuttle drivers are not, he says.



“The rationale is that the city does sell food, like in Kelley Park, but . . . the city would never rent cars,” Mr. Manheim says.

Quick quiz: What does TSA stand for?

• (T)aking (S)cissors (A)way
  
• (T)housands (S)tanding (A)round
  
• (T)ourism (S)uppression (A)gency

Before deciding, please consider that

The Department of Homeland Security is drafting a rule that will require airlines to pass on passenger manifest information as much as an hour before the departure of international flights bound for the United States

Requiring information to be submitted an hour before flight takeoff involves a full 75 minutes greater notice than currently provided. This will mean passengers turning up at the airport at least an additional hour in advance of flight time. Multiplied across all the passengers each day, that’s millions of lost productivity hours each year.

The problem compounds itself for connecting flights. It’s as yet unclear whether a passenger will have to have arrived at a connecting airport before the list is compiled, to prevent the list from including incorrect information driven by misconnecting passengers. If so, connecting flight time will need to be increased as well — playing havoc with airline schedules and wasting more passenger time.

And since the rule is intended to apply not just to passengers bound for the U.S. as their ultimate destination, but also to passengers transiting the U.S. on their way to other destinations, the rule will disadvantage U.S. carriers competing for passenger dollars. Foreign carriers, whose hubs are in countries without the requirement, will be far more consumer friendly for such customers.

Perhaps this would be a worthwhile, though massively costly, investment if it were in any way likely to reduce loss of life from terrorism. But the additional travel time required by the rule will simply be in service of blindly reject people whose names are for whatever reason on a master list. Terrorists, meanwhile, can simply fly under assumed identities.

Just last week Independence Air said that its fourth quarter results would be ‘slightly better’ than the $82.7 million that it lost in the fourth quarter. I was skeptical, pointing out that the emphasis would no doubt be placed on ‘slightly’. Turns out that the results were worse: a fourth quarter loss of $86 million — and they’re still figuring out the accounting, so this may change.

Meanwhile, United lost $326 million in January. After two years of bankruptcy protection they still haven’t figured out a viable business model.

It seems the only ones making money on the airline are the consultants

UAL’s professional payments alone totaled more than $13 million in January, including $1.4 million to consulting firm KPMG LLP; $2.4 million to Kirkland & Ellis LLP, the law firm that serves as United’s lead counsel; and nearly $5.7 million to management consulting firm McKinsey & Co.

Of course that isn’t quite true. JP Morgan Chase – which recently acquired BankOne – does quite well with its United Visa product.

It’s clear why United is being propped up by J. P. Morgan Chase, whose merger partner provided half a billion dollars in debtor-in-possession financing at the time of the airline’s chapter 11 financing and who now is letting United slide on terms of the financing — the continued survival of the carrier was necessary to maintain the bank’s profitable credit card business.

But for some inexplicable reason, Citibank, CIT Group and GE Capital are going along with similar terms and United has apparently received contingent offers for $2 billion to $2.5 billion in exit financing.

USAirways says it needs $250 million to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which strikes me as too low.

Air Wisconsin has proposed investing $125 million. Air Wisconsin operates primarily as a regional feeder for United.

USAirways has been extremely successful reducing its labor costs, but it remains unclear how their business model can return them to profitability. Still, any indication of interest in providing exit financing is a strong positive sign for the airline.

Meanwhile, Independence Air says that it has successfully renegotiated its aircraft leases.

After almost four months of negotiations, Flyi said it will be allowed to terminate leases on 24 of its regional jets — about one-third of its fleet. Those concessions will help cut its aircraft lease payments by $94.5 million over the next two years. Creditors are also allowing the company to defer another $70 million in lease payments over the same period. Flyi also said it was given a five-year, $16.1 million loan from GE Capital Aviation Services Inc. In exchange for the concessions from its creditors, which Flyi did not name, the airline agreed to issue them about 8.3 million shares of stock.

Still, things are far from rosy. They recently had an aircraft repossessed. One of the commenters on this website claims their phones were turned off briefly at Tampa for failure to pay the bill. They’re going to announce fourth quarter earnings shortly and all they can say is that results were “slightly better” than the $82.7 million they lost in the third quarter. So it remains to be seen whether they can make their business model work. But bankruptcy may have been put off for awhile.

Yesterday’s Joe Sharkey column in the New York Times contained a couple of interesting tidbits.

First, according to an American Express survey

[M]ore than a third [of respondents] believe it is either “somewhat” or “quite” common for business travelers to submit expense accounts with “one or more completely false or bogus charges.”

This does not surprise me in the least. Taxicab receipts are usually provided blank to travelers. Other receipts are easy to fudge. And travelers find it easy to justify ‘a little extra’ in their expense report as compensation for long days and time away from home. When oversight is poor, and there’s the expectation of insufficient scrutiny, even the best and most honest travelers may fudge. I see it every day. (One small part of my job is making sure it doesn’t happen where I work.)

Sharkey also points to a change in the way that Continental processes upgrades. I’ve been meaning to blog about this for weeks, since I first heard about the change, because it’s significant.

Effective March 16, Continental said, priority for upgrades will be given to OnePass elite members traveling on full economy fares, based on elite status and time of check-in. Next in line will be those traveling on fares less than full economy, with priority based on elite level, then fare paid, and then time of check-in. The policy for companion travelers accompanying Platinum Elite members also is changing. Companion upgrades will be sorted by the status level of the elite member and by the time of check-in. For instance, Continental said in an e-mail message to its elite members, passengers accompanying a Platinum Elite member will be upgraded only after all other Platinum Elite members have received upgrades.

Instead of considering elite status first for at-the-airport upgrades (also known as “battlefield promotions”), Continental will first look at fare paid on the day of travel. A full fare Silver elite will trump a discount Platinum. Continental is moving towards rewarding individual pieces of revenue rather than loyalty and revenue stream. This is a huge shift.

It seems strange to me, though, because even as Delta backslid and restored full elite qualifying miles on reduced fares, Continental has held on. That means that in order to earn Platinum status, a passenger must be buying tickets with a high fare basis or traveling nearly twice as much (or buying all tickets on the Continental website, which still produces an exemption from the punitive elite qualifying miles scheme). So you’d think those high revenue platinums would get recognized regardless of the fare they’re paying on any particular day. A platinum who buys full fare tickets on business and discount fares on the occasional leisure trip gets penalized under this change.

Companion upgrades will also receive a lower priority at the airport, so that leisure trip with a spouse by the full fare business traveler gets even tougher. Good news for other elites, but a dimunition of platinum.

Lara Flynn Boyle flashed her breasts and tried to climb into bed with a male stranger on board a British Airways flight in first class from Los Angeles to London.

Passengers say they saw the star naked and “wild-eyed” as she leaned over a male passenger, tried to get into his bed, pushed up the window blind next to the man and shouted: “We’re landing, get your clothes on” – even though the flight was still more than four hours away from Heathrow.



The cabin crew gave the actress a blanket to cover herself. But the show continued as she ripped out a reading light from her seat, thrust it at a steward and demanded:



“Get rid of this and get it out of my sight for ever and ever.’



She then walked to the lavatory, flashing her breasts at airline staff, before falling asleep in her seat.

(Hat tip to Today in the Sky.)