Apparently, both flight attendants and passengers alike have had “a lot of complaints” about such content from passengers.  As of right now, only some cross-country flights offer Internet access that passengers can pay $12.95 for.  The “vast majority” of passengers do use discretion.

“It’s a tricky door to open,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy and Information Center in Washington. “Where do you draw the line once you start policing the information your customers can access?”

In addition to American Airlines, JetBlue, Southwest, and Delta all either already offer or plan on offering limited Internet access to travelers by early 2009.  JetBlue, which currently offers Internet, has also reported complains from attendants and passengers about “objectionable Web pages.”  Union reps say that they don’t want to become “moral policemen,” but they also don’t want attendants exposed to violent or pornographic images on laptops, either.

It IS tricky – people paying for a service should have the basis right to look at what they want, but what about violent or sexual DVDs watched on laptops?  And what about young children sitting near these people who may see graphic images?  Come on, porn lovers, you can’t just control yourselves long enough to get a room?!

What do you think?

[Source]

“Logjams in the aisles, significant trash collection, lines at the restrooms — all those things are largely gone on US Airways because fewer people are buying and drinking sodas,” U.S. Airways President Scott Kirby said. “We spend less money, we generate a little revenue, and those problems are largely gone.”

As I watch the Olympics this week, my thoughts keep turning to Anita Cabral of Spring Valley, though she is not an Olympian, or even an athlete.

Cabral is a disgusted former customer of United Airlines, the official airline of the Beijing Games. I think of her whenever I see that United commercial with the orchestra of animated sea creatures playing Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”

I love the music, but I don’t feel rhapsodic when United’s logo appears. I feel blue.

The very mention of United reminds me of how the airline ruined Cabral’s dream vacation and treated her family with an arrogance that is astonishing, even for an airline.

I know. Tales of airlines screwing over their passengers are a dime a dozen. Everybody has a horror story to tell.

But not one like this.

Cabral had meticulously planned this vacation, built around a family reunion in Hawaii and a chance for her grown children to see their father, Cabral’s ex, who was in a hospice dying of cancer.

Eight people were making the trip: Cabral, her husband, her brother, her son, her daughter and her daughter’s husband and two children.

One year out, they wrote a five-figure check to reserve a five-bedroom, five-bathroom beach house. They bought their tickets from United six months early. They booked a jungle excursion, a luau, a trip in a glass-bottom boat.

It was a once-in-a-lifetime trip, and they had a big investment in it, emotionally and financially. They even had it insured.

And all that planning unraveled in just a few hours.

The day before they were to depart, Anita’s daughter, Deanna Kawasaki, received an e-mail from United telling her she could check in her party online. But the site would not let her.

When she called United to see what the trouble was, she was told the flight had been canceled.

But that made no sense. Her stepfather had just confirmed his seat, using a different reservation number, so the flight obviously wasn’t canceled.

United threw out another explanation – a computer “lost” their reservations. That made no sense, either. If her reservations weren’t in the computer, why did she get an e-mail telling her to check in?

At last, United confessed. There was indeed a flight, but they’d been bumped from it. Their assigned seats had been sold to someone else.

It’s funny how every story of airline misbehavior inevitably arrives at this junction – the point at which a passenger must debunk a blatant lie to learn the truth.

Perhaps airlines like being caught in lies, if only because of what follows: The passenger, now distrustful of everything the airline says, is inclined to walk away and make other arrangements.

But other arrangements are hard to make when you’re flying from Los Angeles to Hawaii in the middle of June.

And United – after holding their money for six months and bumping them from the flight on the eve of takeoff – had no plan to help Anita Cabral and her family.

Alternative flights were proposed. But they separated the party of eight into pairs, and staggered their arrivals over several days, and sent them to different islands (leaving them to fend for themselves).

Kawasaki’s 7-year-old daughter has special needs and had not flown before. Both of her parents wanted to be with her. But that counted for nothing.

In the end, the best United could offer was a flight that arrived five days into their weeklong vacation. They declined, and got a refund.

Cabral has a theory for this shabby treatment: fuel prices.

Between January and June, as the oil industry mounted its historic shakedown of consumers, the price of those tickets tripled. The folks who paid the most got to fly.

But that doesn’t explain why United continues her torment.

Remember that Cabral had vacation insurance. Her family received refunds on most of the deposits, but not on all of them, and not on the $10,693 they spent on that beach house.

The insurance company has denied their claim, but the family says all that’s needed to prove their case is a letter from United explaining what happened. But United, they said, won’t write that letter.

Weeks ago I contacted United’s media relations folks seeking an explanation for this abysmal conduct. I never heard back. Maybe they were busy dreaming up further indignities to heap on a trusting public.

Ironically, Cabral knows a lot about the airline industry and its troubles. She works for the Navy, managing a division that handles contracts for SPAWAR, the San Diego-based Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, and oversees $30 million a year in air travel.

You’d think United would want to be nicer to someone in her position.

“Their automatic response is always, ‘We’re sorry if you were inconvenienced.’ There’s no ‘if’ to it. We were inconvenienced. And they’re not sorry,” she said. “I want United to be sorry enough to quit treating people like this.”

Adding to her regret, her ex-husband, John Kakahio Cabral, died July 2 at the hospice where his children had intended to visit him.

So, every time I see that clever United commercial, I get a little angry. But that’s nothing compared with what Anita Cabral goes through as she tries to block memories of a year’s worth of hard work and anticipation.

“Every time I see Hawaii on TV or in a magazine,” she said, “I just feel sick.”

[Source]

“The woman touched my breast. I said, ‘You can’t do that,’ ” Kates said. “She said, ‘We have to pat you down.’ I said, ‘You can’t treat me as a criminal for wearing a bra.’ “

Kates was told by a supervisor that underwire in bras was a leading cause in setting off metal detectors (never had that happen here, but okay) and that she’d have to submit to a patdown or be taken off the flight.  Instead, Kates decided to remove her bra altogether.  When she walked through without setting off an alarm, TSA officials then decided to search all of her carry-on luggagage (spiteful much?)  Kates was detained a total of 40 minutes and subsequently missed her flight to Boston.  She was booked on another flight and arrived 4 hours later than planned.

“It’s actually a little funny in a way, but a sad, sad commentary on the state of our country,” Kates said. “This is bigger than just me. There are 150 million women in America, and this could happen to any of them.”

That’s very true.  Kates will be talking to her family lawyer, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the National Women’s Organization to see how to pursue the incident.

What do you think?  How should this all play out?

[Source]

Reports are coming out that the crew “thought a tire blew as they hurtled down the runway and struggled unsuccessfully to stop the plane.”  According to National Transportation Safety Board member Debbie Hersman, a cockpit voice recording of the Friday night crash indicates the crew tried to abort the takeoff, but then signaled the efforts were failing.

“The crew reacted to a sound that was consistent with a tire blowout,” Hersman said.  Barker and DJ AM are in critical but stable condition and expected to fully recover.

Hersman maintains that no cause of the crash has been determined and the investigation is ongoing.  Pieces of tire were recovered about 2,800 feet from where the plane started its takeoff.   The runway is 8,600 feet long. 

Aviation expert Mary Schiavo said the crew would have had just moments to abort or lift off because such a Learjet needs more than 5,000 feet of runway to get in the air. If the plane hit about 138 mph, which can happen quickly during takeoff, the crew would have run out of runway.  Said Schiavo, “If you have to abort a takeoff because of a problem with the plane, you don’t have a lot of runway left because it uses up so much just on its takeoff roll.”

Killed in the crash was pilot Sarah Lemmon, 31, of Anaheim Hills, Calif., and co-pilot James Bland, 52, of Carlsbad, Calif., Chris Baker, 29, of Studio City, Calif., and Charles Still, 25, of Los Angeles. Baker was an assistant to Barker and Still was a security guard for the musician.

[Source]

Completely unrelated to delays, bumpings or overbooking, we had a shockingly traumatic customer service experience with Airtran coming back from our honeymoon yesterday morning that I wanted to share with you.

We were checking three bags at Boston’s Logan airport and the woman checking us in said one of our bags was oversized and would incur a $29 oversize bag fee. We were surprised, since we weren’t charged a fee for an oversized bag on the first leg of our trip. When we asked her about this, she acted really put out and annoyed and got her supervisor. Her supervisor came over, even more annoyed, and said “If you don’t watch it, I’ll charge you for that first leg, too.” (From a conversation with a customer service person 20 minutes later on the phone, we learned that this is absolutely not authorized under Airtran policy…I’m not sure where that “retroactive extra fee” would have gone).

We protested, and asked for her name and title. She refused to give us her last name and walked away. We asked the woman checking us in for her name—she too refused, and tucked her name badge inside her sweater so we couldn’t see it. Fortunately I had already looked and wrote it down. Deciding that our conversation was over, she yelled out “Next!” We didn’t leave, and asked again for her name and title because we wanted to complain about her hostility and her threat to charge us retroactively for something that obviously wasn’t our fault.

Her response? She yelled “Get the hell out of my god damn face!” in front of about 100 people waiting in line, including many families with small children. We were absolutely shocked, and when I asked her “Did you really just say that to me?” she screamed it again, making threatening gestures and frightening both us and the people around us. Her supervisor watched from about 20 feet away, doing nothing.

When we approached her supervisor to complain, the supervisor’s response was “She didn’t say that”, and her tone insinuated that we had made it up. She added, “There aren’t any witnesses.” When we pointed to several people who could attest to the fact that a) her employee had indeed exploded in the unprovoked, threatening manner described above, and that b) there were dozens of witnesses, the supervisor responded to the effect of “Don’t worry about it. Go to your flight and I’ll handle it.” Her tone was casual, dismissive and condescending, and I’m fairly certain that no disciplinary action was taken since she had essentially watched the episode unfold before her eyes without doing or saying anything.

I’d like to note, too, that when asked again, this supervisor refused to give us her full name.

We had a plane to catch so all we could do was file a formal complaint on the phone and demand our money back for being subjected to such an emotionally traumatizing experience without cause or provocation. They said the best they could offer us was a $25 travel voucher, since “the airline doesn’t compensate for rudeness.” When we explained that this incident transcended rudeness to include being physically threatened and lied to about corporate policy, they didn’t budge.

Any ideas for what we should do next? As you can imagine, we’re furious and want some kind of appropriate resolution—no company should be permitted to treat paying customers like that without repercussions, and we feel like Airtran knows it can get away with this without any consequences.

[Source]

On Feb. 21, 2008, Mitchell Berns heard every flier’s two least favorite words: weather related. Citing snow, Delta Airlines was canceling his flight from Las Vegas to New York City and rescheduling him for a redeye connecting in Boston. With 47% of all delays so far in 2008 caused by weather (up 5% from last year), most fliers can relate. And they know that normally this story ends with a bleary-eyed tale recounted the next day at the water cooler. Not this time. It ends in court, with our traveler $838 richer.

Berns, 55, is a securities litigator with Lane Sash & Larrabee in White Plains, N.Y. On that night he was flying home from a romantic getaway with his wife, who was pregnant with twins. Seeing that other airlines’ planes were still departing as scheduled, Berns asked Delta to refund his ticket so that he could book one of those flights. They told him (politely, as he recalls) that weather-related cancellations or delays are not the airline’s fault and do not come with a refund. Berns checked the National Weather Service report. It said snow that day was expected at five the next morning – hours after his flight was scheduled to land. He and several other passengers from his Delta flight easily booked a JetBlue flight departing at the same time. His tab: $938. He landed at J.F.K. on schedule.

Back at home, Berns did what any consumer with $15 (in New York City) and a working knowledge of English (or Spanish, in most states) can do: He filed a small-claims suit against Delta for $938. Delta did not show up to defend itself, so on June 12 he won a default judgment. When a legal analyst from the airline called him two weeks later to negotiate a payment, he declined an offer of frequent-flier miles (“Confederate currency,” in his words) and made a counteroffer: If you pay me within two weeks, I’ll knock $100 off. Delta agreed but asked for a confidentiality agreement. Berns said they couldn’t have both, and Delta took the discount. (A Delta spokesperson did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

“The lesson is, Don’t let them bully you with bogus cancellations,” says Berns. The whole thing took him about four hours, he recalls, resulting in earnings of less than half his hourly billing rate. “But I’d do it again,” he says. “That’s how good it felt.”

[Source]