Weather and bad behavior cause rides to stop at Hong Kong Disney

by Josh Lew on

According to the operations manager of Hong Kong’s Disneyland, the leading cause of ride stoppages is weather. Nearly seventy percent of all prematurely stopped rides are due to high winds, lightning, or rainfall. But that does not mean that there are not other reasons for cutting the fun short. One of the largest reasons, besides weather, is bad behavior.

According to the park: “The human causes include standing up during rides to take photographs, striking backdrops with umbrellas, or noticeably terrified children being forced onto rides by parents.” So, think twice before dragging Junior on to the super-coaster.

The safety-first rules occasionally cause confrontations between park staff and unruly guests. Staff have recently received training in dealing with guests who don’t know or care about the rules.

The park’s most time consuming task is not enforcing its safety code or watching the skies. It is the nightly inspection of rides, bolt by bolt, that eats away most of the Mouse’s security budget.

Backpacker Shows Us How To Do Everything

by Kraig Becker on

Backpacker.com, the official website for Backpacker Magazine, has a regular feature called “How To Do Everything” which is a set of guides for doing, well, just about everything, at least when it comes to being outdoors and on a trail.

Their most recent entry is on packing and planning and offers up some great tips for backpackers to get them out on the trail as quickly as possible. These include suggestions on how to pack in 20 minutes and how much food to bring along with you for your extended excursions. There is even a quick checklist of items to keep on hand to ensure that you’re always ready to go at a moments notice. (Other great checklists for gear and shopping can be found here.)

The How To Do Everything series is broken down into sub-categories that focus on hiking, camping, gear, and more, and each of those categories offers specific tutorials for that activity. For instance, under hiking you’ll find tips on how to navigate off-trail and how to prevent blisters, while the how to build a fire instructions are filed under the heading for camping.

Backpacker continues to add new entries to the series on a regular basis, and it has grown into a great repository of useful information and tips for new and experienced trekkers alike. So whether you’re heading out to the Appalachian Trail or the Inca Trail, there is probably something that you can find of value here.

Russians predict demise of United States

by Grant Martin on

You had no idea, but the United States is on the verge of civil war. At least that’s what Igor Panarin, a Russian professor and “expert” on American relations is saying. He’s been saying it for years, actually, but just in these past weeks Russian media (and the Kremlin) has picked up his story and is running wild with it.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Panarin’s theory is that “mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces — with Alaska reverting to Russian control.”

Glad you’ve got that schedule down to weeks.

In the end, you skinny-leg jean people out on the east coast will end up joining the European Union, everyone in the south goes to Texas (?!), the west goes to CHINA and everyone in the North? Oh they just fade into Canada.

It’s sad to me that Panarin can not only get away with publishing this theory in Russia but that the state, knowing full well what complete rubbish it is, will let it propigate. But we’re also talking about the country where Dimitry Medvedev is the “President,” people have “rights” and the government isn’t a tyrannical oligarchy, right?

Looking back at ’08 – 5 things we gained this year

by Scott Carmichael on

Welcome to part 2 of my “looking back at ’08” segment. In part 1, I listed 5 things we lost in 2008, and in this article I will list 5 things we gained. While you reminisce about 2008, why not check out my list of 10 New Years resolutions that could help make 2009 a much better travel year!

There is no denying that 2008 will take up a pretty decent chunk of history books in years to come. Between the Chinese Olympics and the total destruction of our economic civilization, I’d say it’s been a pretty interesting year. Oh, and we also elected our first African American president. Awesome stuff. Of course, not much of this means much to us travelers, so here are 5 things we gained in ’08:

Internet in the air

I’m a geek, so I have listed this one first. Needless to say this is also the one that excited me the most in 2008.

Internet in the skies has long been a something airline passengers have wished for. The first glimpse of its potential came from Boeing back in 2004, but like many new technologies, this one failed pretty quickly.

In 2006, United Airlines tried to breathe new life into the seatback Verizon Airfone handsets, by offering some very basic online access. Needless to say, that one did not last long either. For some reason, people were not willing to pay $10 for instant messaging and 5 pages of news clippings.

Then, out of the ashes of the Verizon Airfone infrastructure came Aircell. This company purchased the rights to some of the airwaves used by the old Verizon system, and began offering high speed Internet access on American Airlines.

The first flight to take to the skies with the Aircell Gogo inflight Internet service was an American Airlines plane on August 20th 2008. But before passengers were able to download their emails in the air, a lot of other milestones had to be reached. I’ll take a closer look at what went on behind the scenes in a separate article.

*


Relaxed TSA rules for laptop computers at the checkpoint

Things just kept getting better for us in 2008 at the security checkpoint. After years of harassing us, removing our bottles of water, and treating us like terrorists for carrying a nail clipper, the TSA decided it could put a smile on our faces by allowing certain kinds of laptop bags to pass through the security checkpoint without having to remove our laptops from the bag.

In all, it probably saves no more than 20 seconds, but every second counts at the airport, especially when it involves doing what you can to get as far away from the checkpoint as possible.

We entered 2008 with zero TSA friendly laptop bags, and we’ll be bidding it farewell with over 30 different designs, many of which are listed here.

*

More fees and surcharges

Honestly, I wish this list could contain only happy things. Sadly the year has been pretty rough on the airlines, and when things get rough, they take it out on us.

Fees are what the airlines use to make money, because ticket sales alone apparently don’t work. Clearly someone took a close look at the movie theater business and decided that the expensive popcorn trick would work just fine in the aviation industry.

The worst offender this year was US Airways, but almost every major airline introduced at least one or two new ways to make some money.

*


New runways

While some airports are still stuck with just a single runway, others can’t get enough of them to keep things flowing.

New tarmac was opened this year at Dulles, Seattle and Chicago. The Dulles runway was their first new one since 1946, and is expected to handle over 100,000 flights a year.

Of course, Chicago’s O’Hare airport was probably the one most in need of a new runway, as they had been operating under special flow control restrictions for several years due to congestion.

The new runway in Chicago is part of a much larger “masterplan” to expand the airport, which includes a new ATC tower and terminal renovations.

In other good news, those awful people movers at Dulles are scheduled to be scrapped later next year!

*


New airlines, new routes and new mergers

It sucks to be a legacy carrier. You are doing everything you can to keep your fleet in the sky, and newcomers like Virgin America and OpenSkies pop up, acting like they own the place.

The thing is, many people are so fed up with the state of air travel, that these new carriers are a very welcome addition. Why fly the “friendly skies”, when you can fly an airline that actually is friendly?

In 2008, JetBlue started flying Chicago to Boston, Virgin America added 6 new routes, including New York to Vegas and OpenSkies (a British Airways subsidiary) started flights from New York to Paris and Amsterdam.

And finally, in the “if you can’t beat em, buy em” department; Delta airlines purchased Northwest airlines bringing 2 of the more decent airlines in the skies together as one. One thing is for sure; 2009 is going to be a bumpy ride for many airlines.

Jet circles Zamboanga airport waiting for missing air traffic controllers

by Scott Carmichael on

Unlike our very own Kent Wien, I never trained to be a pilot, but even without those years of training, I can’t imagine it is very comforting to get close to your destination airport and find an unstaffed air traffic control tower.

This is exactly what happened when a jet carrying 156 passengers arrived in the airspace of Zamboanga airport in the Philippines, after a flight from the nation’s capital.

Instead of hearing the familiar commands from the tower telling them they were cleared to land, the Philippine Airlines flight crew heard nothing. It took 30 minutes of circling around the airport for someone to finally make their way to the tower and permit the jet to land.

Of the 5 controllers who were supposed to be on duty that morning, 2 were missing, 2 were late and one was on an approved day off, but their approval note did not make it to the airport administrator. Talk about a total breakdown of communications.

The excuse the remaining 4 controllers presented was that public transport was hard to find the day after Christmas, but officials say the controllers may still have been a little too much in “party mode”. I’m sure that is comforting to hear if you were in the air around Zamboanga that morning.

The newspaper article claims the controllers were fired, but Philippine officials merely say the 5 are currently suspended pending an investigation.

(Via: Sydney Morning Herald)

Other tales from the skies
Amazing and insane stories from a real-life flight attendant and co-pilot