Airports
Flying the Unfriendly Skies With the “Lear Jet Repo Man”
Facing down armed white supremacist militias. Flying solo in a plane that’s lost all power. Escaping from a Haitian prison cell during a
coup d’etat. It sounds like the plot of an Indiana Jones movie, but it’ just another day’s work for airplane repo man Nick Popovich.
Popovich’s exploits, chronicled by Marc Weingarten in Salon.com, have more in common with the French Foreign Legion than the repo guys you see on Spike TV. While they’re towing Toyotas in Tallahassee, Popovich most recently seized the assets of the failed Silver State helicopter flight school, including 240 choppers in various states of disrepair.
read more »New Zealand Launches Hookup Airways
Love is in the air — Air New Zealand, that is. The Kiwi carrier has launched Matchmaking Flight to bring lonely travelers together. After all, what better way to get to know The One than sharing a 13-hour flight on your first date?
If you aren’t up for a blind date, you can try meeting that special someone on the airline’s Matchmaking Flight website, a social networking where passenger can meet and interact in the safety of cyberspace before meeting at the terminal. That could keep you from getting matched with that sketchy guy in Seat 35B who keeps mentioning the mile-high club.
read more »Airman Spots Jetliner’s Fuel Leak At 35,000 Feet
Staff Sgt. Bartek Bachleda knew something was amiss almost immediately after the jetliner left Chicago.
He’d looked out the window and saw what he thought was a fuel leak. He’d know, because he’s a boom operator with the 909th Air Refueling Station based at Kadena Air Base in Japan. That’s where he was headed. He was one of 300 people aboard the flight bound for Narita.
Still, he wanted to be sure, so he kept close watch on the situation. After an hour, he was convinced the plane had a serious problem. He alerted the flight attendant, who appeared unconcerned. He started filming the leak. No one knew it at the time, but the plane was losing 6,000 pounds of fuel an hour. He showed the flight attendant the video.
read more »UK Group Makes Life Hell for Airport Expansion Proponants
For years, environmental groups have been doing everything they can to prevent airport expansion in the UK -– interrupting meetings, staging flash mobs, blockading runways, and buying up land. But there's one group in particular that's been consistently making life miserable for those who support more flights and larger airports.
read more »Greenpeace Buys Land To Block New Heathrow Runway
Greenpeace announced today that it has bought a parcel of land that sits directly in the path of a proposed third runway for London's Heathrow Airport. It's the latest move in a long-running battle between environmentalists who say expanding Heathrow would be an environmental catastrophe, and expansion advocates who say without a new runway Europe's top airport will become an antiquated also-ran.
London Debates a New "Airport on the Sea"
What do you do when your airport is old, crowded, and outmoded, but efforts to expand it get blocked time and time again? Obviously, you shut it down and build a new one on a man-made island. Duh!
Things have gotten so bad at Heathrow Airport that London mayor Boris Johnson has suggested shutting it down and building a new facility on a man-made island in the Thames Estuary, which leads into the North Sea. It's a recycled idea, but it's once again being considered as efforts to build a third runway at Heathrow stall.
A Virtual Tour of JetBlue's Terminal From the Future
JetBlue has designed a terminal that is functional, relaxing, and yes, we'll say it, sexy.
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FAA Airport Slot Auctions Illegal. Now What?
It's not the most exciting news we've heard this week, but for those of us who fly regularly, it's important.
