Travel Archives

November 21, 2003

On The Road Again ...

I'll be scaling down the blogging significantly for the next eight days, as I will be traveling to Southern California for the Thanksgiving holiday with the First Mate, our son and daughter-in-law, and our granddaughter, the Little Admiral. (She's 18 months old, and she's got Grampa wrapped around her little finger.) It'll be the first plane trip for her, and we're all praying that she'll sleep through it, or at least not get all wired up during the 4-hour flight. She'll be visiting Disneyland for the first time, so Grampa's bringing the camcorder and lots of film. I'll post the best picture of it once I get back and have the pictures developed. I do plan on taking the computer with me -- I need something to do on the flight, and the laptop's got a DVD drive, so it's my little entertainment center. My father has a wireless network...

March 1, 2005

Great Moments In Air Safety

The Captain's cousin writes today that he traveled to England last week on a no-frills British Airways flight. When he says no-frills, he really means it. British Airways saved £100,000 on his flight by cutting back on such luxuries as engines and common sense: A BRITISH AIRWAYS jumbo jet carrying 351 passengers was forced to make an emergency landing after an 11-hour transatlantic flight with a failed engine. The fault occurred on take-off from Los Angeles but the pilot declined all opportunities to land in the US and instead continued on three engines for 5,000 miles to Britain. The incident happened three days after a European regulation came into force requiring airlines to compensate passengers for long delays or cancellations. Under the new rules, if the pilot had returned to Los Angeles, BA would have been facing a compensation bill of more than £100,000. So to save themselves £100,000, the...

March 2, 2005

British Airways Passenger Describes Flight

Yesterday, I wrote about the decision by British Airways to continue a flight from Los Angeles to Heathrow despite blowing an engine at takeoff from LAX. The flight almost ran out of fuel due to the lower altitude forced on it by the engine loss and had to make an emergency landing at Manchester. It turns out that BA forced the pilots to continue despite several attempts by American air controllers to get them to land simply to avoid cash penalties for flight delays which kick in at the five-hour mark. One of the passengers on that flight just happened to be my cousin, Mike Reger, who tipped me to the Times of London article on the flight. Mike followed up with a description of the flight: As a 50 year old seasoned traveler all seemed fine on this excursion at first ... We lifted off from LAX and all...

March 4, 2005

Does British Airways Only Own One Airplane?

CNN reports that British Airways has had another in-flight engine failure that they ignored to complete the flight on time. Remarkably, the plane involved is the same one that blew an engine on takeoff last week, ran out of fuel, and forced to make an emergency landing in Manchester -- and the engine that failed yesterday was the replacement for the first failure: British Airways jet that continued on an 11-hour flight from Los Angeles to London after one of its four engines lost power also flew on three engines on a later flight from Singapore to London, the airline said Friday. The Boeing 747 left Singapore on February 25 and landed at London's Heathrow Airport the next day, arriving only 15 minutes behind schedule, BA spokesman Jay Marritt said. Three hours into the 14-hour flight, an oil pressure indicator showed there was a problem with one of the engines,...

September 28, 2007

Experience The Adventure Of Travelocity

I've found that booking my travel for the blog on Travelocity normally gets me good bargains and excellent adaptability. However, in order to use it properly, one has to focus on the details of the itineraries in order to avoid having unusual adventures. Tonight, I'm learning the lesson the hard way in Atlanta's Hartsfield Airport. Initially, I wanted to fly back from my Solutions Day trip around midday, and I thought that's what I'd booked. It would have brought me home in time to do my Heading Right Radio show and then get some rest for more travel. I've already booked my flight to DC on Monday for a special event, after which I'll do my HRR show at the prime-time hour of 9 pm ET to discuss the event, which I can't talk about at the moment. However, late last night I realized that I had selected an 11...

October 14, 2007

Oh, The Things You'll See

Apropos of nothing at all .... When I lived in Southern California and traveled through LAX, I'd usually see a celebrity of one sort or another on every pass through the airport. Living in Minneapolis and traveling mostly to DC or Orange County, though, I haven't seen any that I recall. So I was a little surprised to see Steve Tyler of Aerosmith coming through the security checkpoint with me here in Reno. It took me a couple of moments to be sure of it, but it's pretty difficult to confuse him with anyone else. Many of the women in the terminal were also pleasantly surprised to see him as well. They called out greetings to him, ignoring the woman with whom he was traveling. After a few minutes of that, I can imagine it gets old for both Tyler and his companion. He's still somewhere in my terminal as...

October 22, 2007

What NASA Won't Tell You

NASA commissioned a study of aviation safety through thousands of interviews with the people with a bird's-eye view of the industry -- the pilots. After conducting telephone interviews with 24,000 commercial and general aviation pilots from 2001 to 2005, NASA had a good picture of the difficulties faced by the industry. Now they refuse to share that information, and have instructed their contractor to erase all the data: Anxious to avoid upsetting air travelers, NASA is withholding results from an unprecedented national survey of pilots that found safety problems like near collisions and runway interference occur far more frequently than the government previously recognized. NASA gathered the information under an $8.5 million safety project, through telephone interviews with roughly 24,000 commercial and general aviation pilots over nearly four years. Since ending the interviews at the beginning of 2005 and shutting down the project completely more than one year ago, the...

November 14, 2007

Fact-Finding Trip Disclosure

I will travel the next two days to Houston and Corpus Christi on a tour arranged by the American Petroleum Institute (API). The tour includes other bloggers, including Bruce McQuain of QandO, who announced it earlier today. We will take a tour of Chevron's Blind Faith platform before they deploy it -- a platform designed to pump a new field in the Gulf of Mexico. We will also tour their visualization center, get a briefing on deepwater drilling, and have a lengthy Q&A session with Chevron representatives. Obviously, I hope to get a better perspective on oil drilling, the petroleum industry, and energy policy as a result. However, Captain's Quarters readers should know that API has covered my travel and lodging expenses for this trip. The following disclosure statement comes from API and it constitutes the only stipulation for the trip: API has underwritten Edward Morrissey’s travel expenses to attend...