Galley Gossip: Italy: Prepare for takeoff.

by Heather Poole on

“Want to go to Italy?” The husband asked.

“Umm…I don’t know…Yes. As in YES YES YES!” I exclaimed. And then I added, “But I’m not flying standby.” Because I wasn’t. And I was ready to stand my ground.

“Yeah, well me neither,” he said, and that was that.

When The Husband and I decided to go to Italy on our vacation last month, we actually purchased our tickets, even though I can fly standby for free. Why? Because we wanted to go to Italy, remember? We actually wanted to make it to the land of wine and cheese and olives and pasta and prosciutto served with a loaf of crusty bread.

What we didn’t want to do was get stuck sitting around an airport for days praying that two people wouldn’t show up for their flight. Oh no, we wanted to get fat from drinking wine and eating cheese and olives and pasta and prosciutto with a loaf of crusty bread in Venice, Rome, and Positano. Not from cheeseburgers and pizza at the JFK food court. And not only did we have plans to eat our way through Italy, we also planned on getting back home when the vacation came to an end. Oh the joys of stand-by travel…

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Because The Husband flies over 100,000 miles a year, we were able to use his frequent flier miles to bump us up to business class, where you can usually find me working. Did I happen to mention this was a dream trip, a trip we’ve been planning for years, a trip that was supposed to be our honeymoon trip five years ago things got screwed up and we wound up in Playa Blanca, a teeny tiny town near Zihautanejo. The war had just broken out and someone was afraid to travel too far from home for fear of getting stuck, since that same someone had gotten stuck in Zurich with her mother for two weeks immediately following 9/11.

Okay okay, so there are worse places to get stuck than Zurich, I know, but when you’re a flight attendant and make a flight attendant salary, it’s very easy to go broke on cappuccino and croissant alone. Though there are worse ways to go broke, I guess.

The best part about actually buying a ticket on a flight, opposed to standing-by for free, is that you get to choose your seat. A window seat, that’s what I chose, and that’s exactly what I got. Man, I couldn’t wait to get on that airplane. And sit. Not work. And watch movies. As others worked. While I sat. Not working. I did mention that this was my dream trip, right? Oh yeah, trust me, that’s part of the dream. I couldn’t wait to take off from JFK at dusk, my favorite time of day, and look out my window, camera in hand, from a business class seat. Not the jumpseat. I couldn’t wait to see a breathtaking view of New York City. Not the first class closet. Or the business class galley. Or the nasty coach carpet. Or the flight attendant sitting next to me. No offense to the flight attendant sitting next to me, whoever that flight attendant may happen to be. I couldn’t wait to….oh you get the picture. Speaking of pictures, here’s a few from our flight from New York to London, where we transferred to another flight that would take us to Venice.

Photo of the Day (06/19/08)

by Kent Wien on

St. Maarten is the greatest location in the world for aviation spotters, and we’ve featured a number of those pictures here. But this one from matt.hintsa stands out for me because of the timing of the crashing waves.

I’m dying to bring my camera to that beach someday. While I’ve been there a number of times, I’ve never left the airport, so my pictures were only from this perspective.

Well done, Matt!

Are you a Flickr user who’d like to share a travel related picture or two for our consideration? Submit it to Gadling’s Flickr group right now! We just might use it for our Photo of the Day!

That tanker order might not be going to Northrop and EADS after all

by Grant Martin on

Remember that huge ruckus earlier this year when Northrop and EADS won a contract to supply the US Air Force with a multi-billion dollar tanker order?

Americans went livid when they found out that a partially European (not French) company was going to be supplying equipment for the US Armed forces and the entire affair turned into a political whining point. People claimed that the French (not Europeans) would be taking American jobs, although many would still be created with Northrop plan, and few seemed to take some time to look at the facts: Boeing’s aircraft was the weaker tanker.

On departing the competition, the Chicago based airframe manufacturer vowed to fight on, and lo and behold, their appeal to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found traction. Earlier this week the office determined that the competition was held unfairly and that the Air Force gave extra points to the opposing team where they shouldn’t have; you can read the gory details in this WSJ article, but I won’t bother you with them.

While these findings aren’t binding requirements to force the Air Force to rerun their competition, it’s a step in the right direction — an earlier recommendation by the GAO to rerun a helicopter manufacturing contract passed and is currently underway.

Now, if the entire competition goes back to the drafting table, Boeing will have a second chance to proffer the “correct” tanker and take another stab at America’s “overseas competition”. All at the cost of countless engineering, design, management, political and lobbying hours and even more tax dollars.

Fair is fair though, and as several commenters on the the above post and the GAO point out, you can’t award a contract on an uneven playing field.

May the best aircraft win.

Passenger lights cigarette, punches flight attendant and diverts flight to Denver

by Grant Martin on

We may have a new contender for worst passenger on an aircraft ever, ladies and gentlemen. Sorry Kyla and girls who think they’re prettier than the rest of the plane, you may have met your match.

On a Jetblue flight between San Francisco and New York this past Tuesday, Christina Szele just couldn’t wait any any longer for a smoke and decided to light up in the cabin. Obviously this has been outlawed on planes for years, so a flight attendant went back to ask her to put it out.

In response to the request, Szele instead verbally abused the flight attendant with racist remarks, provoking futher concern from the crew. After further agitation, several employees decided to restrain her and were able to secure her well enough to apply flexible handcuffs.

Untill she broke out of them. And punched the flight attendant that she was earlier harrasing in the face. Great idea.

Things got so far out of hand that the pilot had to divert the flight into Denver and have the woman removed from the aircraft and arrested. Now she faces 20 years in prison and up to 250,000 in fines.

I think that they should have just thrown her out of the plane with a parachute.

More women behaving badly at 35,000 feet:

Upgraded to cockpit. That’s a new one.

by Iva Skoch on

What are the odds of being upgraded to cockpit, if a flight is overbooked? Not great, but I will keep hoping.

I read with envy the NY Times column of Greg Cohen, a corporate frequent flier, who got “upgraded” from business class to the cockpit jumpseat on a flight from Stockholm to Prague with Czech Air because it was overbooked.

He doesn’t mention when this occurred but something tells me it was a long, long time ago, before cockpits were supposed to be as secure as bank safe deposit rooms. It just couldn’t happen nowadays, could it?

I fly Czech Air all the time and this never happens to me. I even fly business class with Czech Air because their frequent flier program, OK Plus, allows for easy upgrades. But cockpit? Nobody has ever asked me to sit next to the pilot. How cool would that be? I would gladly skip the warm nuts and sparkling wine of business class for the view out of a cockpit.