Category: Travel

Turkish Airlines’ new 787-9 damaged during a photo shoot

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In case you missed it, Seth reported that Turkish Airlines’ brand new 787-9 was damaged during a photo shoot.

Reports suggest that the aircraft window melted out of its mount in the fuselage. How did it get so hot? Seems that the company was filming inside the plane and had it fitted inside and out with studio lighting to make that work. The heat from those lights caused the window to melt.

It seems like the back light was way too close to the fuselage and melted one of the electrochromatic windows. The photos are kind of crazy.

It is still not clear whether the actual carbon fiber fuselage was damaged in any way or if it was just the window.

Paint Me Unimpressed

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Images of United’s new livery hit the internet last night before the official “reveal” today in Chicago. The new paint scheme drops the gold elements from the look and replaces them with different blues.


For all the hype that United was trying to generate around the new livery, overall it appears like a very minor change done poorly. Here are some quick thoughts:

  1. The “logo” is still the globe, just simplified. United and their partners in this branding had a chance to re-imagine the globe and give us something new, but for whatever reason, they doubled down on it.
  2. The blue looks “cheap”. The particular blue that United chose for their name and around the engines has a tone to it that looks odd. Maybe it is the light in the hanger, but the color seems like something I’d see on a bad ad for hair care products.
  3. There is a ton of white. The look is minimalist but it seems overly so.
  4. There is nothing that stands out. I think this is the thing that bothers me the most. There was a real opportunity to do something interesting and new but United went the opposite direction, playing it as safe as they could while getting a “new” look.

There was a large release by United a while back on new uniforms, onboard amenities, etc. that incorporated plum and other hues of purple and it is disappointing that with the new livery they steered clear of including those colors. At the end of the day though, it is just paint. I fly inside of the plane. What I would really like to see is United focus on their soft product and customer service. Start delivering on those things and I think people will forget what colors are painted on the plane and just remember it by the name and the service they receive.

What do you think?

The Madrid Ghost Plane

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From CNN:

Officials from the Adolfo Suárez-Madrid Barajas airport are trying to find the owners of a plane that has been parked on the tarmac, without moving, for years.
Airport director Elena Mayoral submitted an official notice to the Boletín Oficial del Estado, the official gazette of the Kingdom of Spain, informing the nation of a plane in an “obvious state of abandonment” at the airport.

Once the official notice goes out, the owner has three months to get in touch with the airport otherwise the plane will be sold off at auction.

What United Should Prioritize Over Free DirecTV

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United announced today that they will be offering free DirecTV service on all 211 Boeing 737s that have the television service.

Just in time for the Big Game, United Airlines today announced that effective immediately more than 100 channels of live television will now be free on 211 Boeing 737 United aircraft equipped with seat back TV, making viewing easy gate-to-gate. In addition to offering free live DIRECTV at more than 30,000 seats, United customers also have access to hundreds of movies and TV shows available on personal devices through the airline’s collection on the United app – offering customers thousands of hours of programming in total.

While it’s a great news release (American Airlines is doing something similar for the “big game”) it glosses over the fact that United is actively removing the DirecTV equipment from the 737s that are going in for new seats or heavy maintenance. I have not heard details but I do believe the plan is to go to an all personal device streaming setup eventually. This is really an interim step on the way to that goal.


What United really should be focused on is getting Wi-Fi working consistently on their domestic fleet. I have been on a number of flights the last few months where the Wi-Fi has either not worked or been so slow that it was not worth using. I rarely watch any of the live television programming while flying, opting instead to turn it to the inflight map channel. I use my time on planes to read or catch up on work and for the latter, I need working internet. The internet service domestically on United has been abysmal. The international planes, in my experience, have fewer Wi-Fi problems, though I have had a few long flights where the internet was not working from the beginning.

It is one reason I have steered clear of United’s year long Wi-Fi subscription. I am not going to invest cash in something that does not reliably work and that cannot be easily refunded on a per flight basis. A subscription service is great in theory for people who are frequent travelers and United’s pricing for it isn’t awful. But my guess is that the people who have purchased it have not been happy. While Delta and Alaska Wi-Fi on GoGo may not be the fastest, for the most part it works all of the time. That’s the reliability I and others want with United’s inflight internet.

United needs to focus their attention on some of the basic things that makes their product worth flying rather than trying to match Delta in hopes to lure a few more customers with shiny things. I want on-time performance, good schedules, working Wi-Fi, and friendly customer service. Everything else is icing on the cake.

Bartending in Antartica

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From Atlas Obscura:

No one owned Club 90 South, and no one paid. Instead, people shared supplies they brought from home (as part of the allocated 125 pounds of luggage per person) or bought from the station store. Bartenders did not earn salaries—only kudos. Broughton started tending bar Fridays and Saturdays, and soon he spent most nights after dinner mixing cocktails and pouring a “disturbing number” of Prairie Fire shots, which Broughton made with tabasco and tequila. He served absinthes from the astrophysics team, Black Seal rum from a Bermudan at McMurdo Base, and Bundaberg rum from an Australian. Mixing his research job with his side hustle, Broughton made cocktails using liquid nitrogen, bringing the haute cuisine trend of molecular mixology to the bottom of the world.

Life at the bottom of the world sounds interesting, to say the least.

United unveils new uniforms

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From Today in the Sky:

United Airlines employees will get their first look Wednesday at new uniforms that will soon roll out to all 70,000 of the carrier’s frontline workers.

The new line comes with a distinct look that includes colors like “Pacific Blue,” “Premium Purple,” and “Atlantic Amethyst” — all among a half-dozen hues that United first teased this past August.

I don’t quite understand the aquamarine color scheme and to be honest I am not a huge fan of the rest of the options either. The one style of men’s sports coat is strange, with silver stitching at the pockets, really makes it look dated.

What do you think?

American Airlines Considers Ending Ticket Changes If Congress Limits Fees

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From Bloomberg:

American Airlines Group Inc. would consider barring passengers from changing nonrefundable tickets if Congress limits what carriers can charge for the adjustments, Chief Executive Officer Doug Parker said Tuesday.

This is coming from some legislation making its way through Congress:

Doing away with changes to nonrefundable fares would make airline flights more like baseball games or concerts, where customers aren’t typically reimbursed if they buy tickets and can’t use them. Carriers currently consider the ability to change a nonrefundable ticket as a service that carries a cost. Such fees, which run up to $200, anger many passengers.

The language limiting what carriers can charge for ticket changes is being supported by consumer groups as a bipartisan provision. It is in a version of an aviation-policy bill sponsored by Republican Senator John Thune of South Dakota, who is chairman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. Parker called the proposal “really bad for consumers” last week.

I can’t say I blame American Airlines. Change fees have been around since the days of regulated aviation in the U.S. and the only reason I can think of to change the rules now is to appease some percentage of the voting public.

Is a limitation on the cost of change fees good for the consumer? On the surface, it’s easy to say yes, but when you dig into how airlines oversell flights and offer last minute seats or adapt to weather situations, I think the answer becomes a more complex “no”. Maybe Congress should simply focus on the transparency of the fares and underlying fare rules. If it becomes clear what consumers can and cannot do on a fare, rather than having to dig through pages and pages of fare rules, it becomes easier to make decisions.

When a trip goes sideways

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A couple of weeks ago I was on my way to Taipei and Hangzhou with Fozz. The goal was to fly United’s last flight between Hangzhou and San Francisco. To do that, we planned to spend a day in Taipei first then head to Hangzhou, where we could transit without visa for another full day before flying back to the US.


On Friday the 13th (very appropriate) I woke up at 7am to catch my Portland-San Francisco flight and saw we were delayed by 55 minutes. No big deal, I had almost two hours to connect. The Santa Rosa wildfires had caused issues the day before as I returned from Las Vegas via San Francisco as well and I figured everything would be delayed. When I got to the airport the delay was 1.5 hours and I decided to talk to one of the gate agents about my options. She stated that there was an EVA flight to Taipei that left at 5:50pm that I would still have plenty of time for so she “protected” me on it, leaving my original United flight in the record should I get to San Francisco in time to make that flight.

By the time I boarded the plane in Portland, our flight was 2.5 hours delayed and I knew there was no way I would make my original connection but I was confident in making the EVA flight and stayed on the plane. Landing in San Francisco was uneventful and as I chatted with Fozz on the phone, the plane to Taipei was still at the gate with the door open. I might just make it! But it wasn’t to be. I arrived at the gate only to be sternly told that they were not taking anymore passengers. As I was told this, another person who was connecting was allowed to board. The only thing I can figure is that they had spoken to her previously or she was a standby passenger.

I still was not stressed, as I had an EVA flight confirmed, so I went to look for an EVA agent who could get me a boarding pass. Unfortunately, the EVA gate did not yet have an agent present and there was no one at the transfer desk. I also learned that both EVA’s and Singapore’s lounges at SFO had recently closed to make room for United’s new Polaris lounge. This left me in a position where my only option was to exit security and go to EVA’s ticket counter.

The agents at the EVA counter were very friendly and politely told me that they had no ticket for me and that I would need to talk to United to have them send the ticket over again. 45 minutes later and I was speaking with a United ticket agent who told me that the Portland agent should not have reissued the ticket the way she did and that it had been rejected by EVA. Due to the fires everything was full the next day but during this time Fozz had texted me to say that his plane was returning to the gate. The thought popped into my head that I might just be able to get back on that flight…

An aside, I still do not know why the United ticket agent at SFO did not offer to reissue a coach ticket on EVA. The original ticket was coach that was upgraded via a GPU, so my expectation was that she would at least offer coach on EVA. Maybe EVA was sold out in the back cabin due to the fires and misconnects?

Anyway, I went back through security using my original SFO-Taipei boarding pass and met Fozz at the gate. We asked an agent to relist me for the flight and she told us she could only do it after they had boarded, so we waited.

To make a long story short, the offer was to put me in coach in a middle seat (rather than downgrade the passenger they had upgraded into my seat) or to perform a carry over/carry back, essentially a trip-in-vain. At this point I was super tired and decided to just head back to Portland. Fozz was in agreement and decided to trip-in-vain as well.


I eventually made it back to Portland at midnight after dealing with multiple agents to get the tickets properly notated and reissued. It was a mess getting home, but in my mind, was the right decision. The Taipei flight landed nearly six hours late and would have completely burned our time in the city as we would have spent most of that getting to the hotel and back to the airport. I was bummed to miss the last Hangzhou-San Francisco flight, but at least I got an interesting blog post out of it.

If you’d like to hear more, Fozz and I recorded a Dots, Lines and Destinations episode about it.

ANA Fist Fight Points to Deeper Problem

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Another day, another incident on an airplane involving passengers and violence. This time it took place on an ANA flight from Tokyo to Los Angeles. Thankfully the plane had not left the gate yet and the passenger who instigated the fight was arrested and charged with assault. Some reports state that alcohol was a factor and while that doesn’t surprise me, there is something else going on. This is the fifth or so widely circulated incident of violence among or against airline passengers.

Some people want to blame the airlines for this. They’re an easy target and in some instances, they are absolutely to blame but the general trend of people simply resorting to violence in simple instances of misunderstanding is taking place more and more often lately.

I think it’s a mix of lack of patience, an unwillingness to forgive or admit fault, and a general feeling of frustration. Life is moving so fast that people forget that they aren’t the only ones with stress or difficult circumstances and are quick dole out their anger on others.

We need patience and understanding now more than ever. As I pointed out on a recent episode of Dots, Lines and Destinations, we need to be peacemakers rather than those who encourage this violent behavior.

Credit Score Changes Coming

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The Associated Press is reporting that big changes are coming to the way credit scores are calculated. The changes would be for VantageScore, a company that handled 8 billion account applications and is the prime score used for credit card applications.

Of note is the following:

Using what’s known as trended data is the biggest change. The phrase means credit scores will take into account the trajectory of a borrower’s debts on a month-to-month basis. So a person who is paying down debt is now likely to be scored better than a person who is making minimum monthly payments but has been slowly accumulating credit card debt.

The news continues:

But VantageScore will now mark a borrower negatively for having excessively large credit card limits, on the theory that the person could run up a high credit card debt quickly. Those who have prime credit scores may be hurt the most, since they are most likely to have multiple cards open. But those who like to play the credit card rewards program points game could be affected as well.

This could spell the end of credit card churning for those who partake in that game. Having multiple accounts open with large debt limits will possibly penalize you due to the risk that such behavior poses.

Without seeing it in action, it is hard to know if this is a good or bad thing, but my gut says that rewarding positive behavior (paying down debt, not having lots of cards open) is a good thing.

The AP doesn’t list a date for when these possible changes will take place, but it will be interesting to see play out.