Airline food sucks. Mostly, it’s the food. But it’s also the altitute.

The People In Charge telling us that something is Necessary For Our Own Good makes a large number of people accepting of the inconvenience, no matter how asinine or unsupported by evidence.

Manned flight is more than a century old. Why are the airlines still so clueless?

Just over a month after the first ash clouds from Iceland’s erupting Eyjafjallajokull volcano are once again playing havoc with air travel in parts of Europe: Thousands of passengers were facing further travel chaos today as a new ash cloud covered large parts of the UK and forced the closure of a number of airports [...]

Reacting to the overnight news that Continental and United have agreed to merge, creating the world’s largest airline, satirist Scott Ott coins a new term:  “Too big to fly.” He’s kidding, of course, but in humor, as in wine, there’s often much truth.  From the NYT’s non-satirical account: The all-stock deal would form a coast-to-coast [...]

Andrew Sullivan continues his “Creepy Ad Watch” series with this old American Airlines ad with the slogan “Think of her as your mother.” I’ve seen that one before and, indeed, even used it to illustrate my “Fly the Unfriendly Skies” post a couple years back.  I noted then that, I despise flying despite having done [...]

AP’s Harry Weber offers some tips to “speed through airline security.”  For the most part, they’re rather dubious. Consider bringing your laptop in a sleeve. Skooba Design sells a laptop sleeve for $19.95 that you can carry on your own with a removable shoulder strap and can unfold to lie flat on the airport X-ray [...]

Longtime national security blogger Michael Yon posted this on his Facebook page about an hour ago: Got arrested at the Seattle airport for refusing to say how much money I make. (The uniformed ones say I was not “arrested”, but they definitely handcuffed me.) Their videos and audios should show that I was polite, but [...]

The Obama administration has announced that citizens traveling to the United States from 14 countries will undergo more intensive airport security screening.   Eric Lipton for NYT: Citizens of 14 nations, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, who are flying to the United States will be subjected indefinitely to the intense screening at airports worldwide that [...]

An aside in my post this morning defending President Obama from charges he took inadequate measures to prevent the attempted Detroit bombing has caused John Cole some distress. I observed that, “There’s room to criticize the administration’s response to the crisis, most notably DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano’s idiotic insistence that “the system worked.” John retorts: [...]

By any reasonable measure, we’re far too apprehensive about terrorism and expend far too many resources and sacrifice far too much liberty defending against its risks.  But there are smart ways and dumb ways to make that point. Nate Silver, responding a few days ago to one of my posts, demonstrates the former: Over the [...]

Two days after a Nigerian al Qaeda operative tried to blow up Northwest Flight 253 as it landed in Detroit, we had an eerie repeat.  Another Nigerian on the exact same flight locked himself in the lavatory and refused to come out.  Thankfully, it was a case of the trots, not a terrorist plot. The [...]

It now appears that the thwarted failed Detroit terror plot was more sophisticated than initially thought.  The first reports — that the device was “incendiary rather than explosive” — appear to be mistaken. And we now think we know how the explosives got aboard the plane:  They were sewn into the terrorist’s underwear. Richard Esposito [...]

Not surprisingly, TSA is going to make flying even more aggravating in a stupid overreaction to the Detroit terror plot. In the wake of the terrorism attempt Friday on a Northwest Airlines flight, federal officials on Saturday imposed a new layer of restrictions on travelers that could lengthen lines at airports and limit the ability [...]

The botched attempt by one Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab, allegedly somehow connected to al Qaeda, attempting to blow up a passenger jet as it made its descent into Detroit quite naturally has the blogosphere buzzing. Richard Fernandez and Josh Marshall have good roundups of the news as  it was developing throughout the evening, along with the [...]

The federal government is placing limits on the ability of airlines to mistreat customers. They don’t go nearly far enough. U.S. airlines could face stiff fines for stranding passengers aboard grounded planes for more than three hours, according to a regulation that officials said on Monday was aimed at upholding passenger rights. The Transportation Department [...]

The hard luck story of Bryan Lawlor demonstrates the brutality of the free market. The dark blue captain’s hat, with its golden oak-leaf clusters, sits atop a bookcase in Bryan Lawlor’s home, out of reach of the children. The uniform their father wears still displays the four stripes of a commercial airline captain, but the [...]

Via Andrew Sullivan, I see that Daniel Indiviglio argues that “We like bad customer service.” Actually, though, while he states it, he doesn’t really argue that at all.  Rather, he argues that we’re not willing to pay more for good customer service and thus provide no incentive to companies to provide it. Let’s say you [...]