Happy Birthday Engadget! Enter to win free Virgin America tickets

by Grant Martin on

Our sister blog Engadget turns four this month and what better way to celebrate than to give stuff away? They’ve teamed up with one of our favorite airlines, Virgin America, to give away six pairs of tickets to anywhere the airline flies.

Soon you too can be cruising the mood-lit skies while you browse through hundreds of movies, mp3, videogames and sip martinis. Or you could relax into your leather seats, log into the inter-cabin chat room and try to hit on the hottie in 13b. It doesn’t matter to us, just tell them that Engadget sent you.

Just remember, Virgin America doesn’t fly to Middle America. If you do plan on entering in this contest, take a look at their route map and make sure that you’re in the proximity of one of their airports. After all, it doesn’t make much sense to buy a ticket from Portland to San Francisco just to take a free ticket to Seattle, right?

Check out Engadget’s birthday bonanza and enter for your chance to win.

Saudi plane catches fire while landing in Bangladesh

by Aaron Hotfelder on

If Saudi flights are anything like those in Pakistan, they probably begin with a prayer. Though it’s, of course, always good to have Allah on your side, having the flight attendants lead a prayer before taking off does not inspire confidence. But maybe it helped in this case…

A Saudi airliner flying into Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, caught fire while landing yesterday, though none of the 307 passengers or crew on board were seriously injured.

Apparently one of the engines of the plane, a Boeing 747, caught fire as the plane touched down, but the fire thankfully did not spread to the fuel reservoirs. After landing, the pilot reportedly opened the emergency exit doors and the passengers left the plane via the big yellow playground slide. Fun!

More here.

What strange things have been found on planes?


Click the image to read the bizarre story…

Federal appeals court overturns New York’s Passenger Bill of Rights

by Anna Brones on

For a brief second I thought that airline passengers just might be making headway in the notoriously frustrating airline industry. That was until today when the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a law requiring airlines to provide basic necessities to passengers stuck on a plane delayed on the ground.

When New York passed the Passenger Bill of Rights last August — intended to take effect at the beginning of this year — several other states joined in and proposed their own bills, all in the name of passenger comfort. Granted the bill didn’t provide for anything too luxurious; it only required commercial airlines to provide things like food, water, functional restrooms and fresh air when a flight was pushed back and held on the tarmac for over three hours. But in today’s airline industry where a meal is a bag of three unsalted peanuts, it’s easy to get excited about the little things.

The Passenger Bill of Rights may seem to require the bare minimum of what airlines should provide to passengers in such situations, but the airlines, represented by the Air Transport Association of America, appealed the bill anyway, as reported by CNN. With today’s official ruling that “New York’s new state law interferes with federal law governing the price, route or service of an air carrier,” we can probably assume that other states aren’t going to get much farther.

Looks like we passengers still have a long way to go.

Another serious safety scare at Qantas

by Abha Malpani on

With 4 safety scares in a month, Qantas seems to have serious problems to deal with.

The latest: 4 tires of one of its 747’s taking off from LA International Airport blew up on the runway. The 232 passengers and crew on board were not hurt; everyone was evacuated from the plane immediately and taken to a hotel. According to the story in the Sydney Morning Herald, the plane may leave today “subject to the aircraft being cleared for operations”.

Other things that have happened to Qantas this month (!):
– Qantas flying from Singapore to London was forced to land at New Delhi Airport for 36-hours due to a technical problem.
– Oil was found leaking from a Qantas aircraft about to land at Sydney Airport.
– A Qantas 737 flight from Townsville landed at Brisbane Airport with smoke coming from its landing gear.

AND…earlier this year in January, a 747 lost almost all power on its descent into Bangkok because of a water leak that shut down 3 of the 4 power generating units.

AND AND…all of this happened right after December last year when Qantas announced a record half-year profit before tax of $905 million, a 73 per cent increase on the previous year. Looks like that jinxed the airline big time.

Next feature for the A380? Showers!

by Grant Martin on

Dubai’s Emirates airline just started revealing some plans for its A380 configurations. They’re the second customer for Airbus’s giant airship with delivery slated for later this year. And it looks like they’re going to try to beat Singapore Air, the first customer, in sheer ridiculousness of their first class product.

With showers. Yes, first class travelers on the new, highly-coveted Emirates A380 routes will soon be able to take a shower while they’re flying in the world’s skies. The service is slated to unroll on the new New York – Dubai A380 route scheduled for October 1, but eventually will be augmented into all of their super jumbo jets.

I’m curious as to whether this is going to be a high-water pressure, multi-head luxury shower or a tiny RV-style drizzle of water from the ceiling.

To support this service, Emirates plans to haul an extra TON of water on the aircraft, thus as the Times Online reports, increasing the carbon output by an extra 25 tons. Baffling. But as many airlines are wagering these days, the real money lies in the business class product. We cattle will pay anywhere around $1,000 for a flight between New York and Dubai, but each business class ticket should run around $18,000.

So much for being eco-friendly.