Airline snacks: bad for you?

by Catherine Bodry on

Airline snacks have moved beyond peanuts and pretzels (although there’s no shortage of either on flights), but are they better or worse for us than the salty standards?

Charles Stuart Platkin analyzed nine U.S. airlines’ snacks, and at first glance the results weren’t as depressing as I expected. United Airlines got 4.5 stars out of an available 5 on Platkin’s health scale. The snacks most airlines serve are far better than the free meals of old, he reports, which are “worse than a McDonald’s Big Mac, fries and shake” combined.

Platkins studied an airline’s variety of food, nutritional value, calorie count and the airlines’ willingness to provide nutritional information. What’s crazy is that United Airlines’ top-scoring snack — which is “vegetarian-friendly, trans-fat-free,” and contains granola, organic peach applesauce, cheddar cheese and other items — has 810 calories.

810 calories! In a “healthy” snack. If that’s the good news, I don’t think I can handle the bad news. If you can, read the rest of the article here.

Thanks to Steven Yuen-Pak Liu on Flickr for the photos of his not-so-nutritious American Airline’s snack pack.

Using Facebook to find cheap airfare (and stalk people)

by Jerry Guo on

The hit social networking site Facebook recently introduced third party applications that serve various purposes. Some are useful: trading music tips. Some are more frivolous: killing zombies. Now there’s a nifty little tool that could save you cold hard cash. It’s an app called “Where I’ve Been,” which mainly serves to show your friends, well, where you’ve been.

But one of its newest features is “flight finder,” which lets you select a departure city and then view a visual representation of the cheapest fares to hundreds of international destinations. The best part is you can narrow the results based on how much you’re willing to pay. For instance, I wanted to go somewhere cheap in late December, so I selected Newark, NJ as the departure city and then used the slider to put a $500 max on airfare. Most of the dots that popped up were in Europe or the states, but I also found a $400 ticket to Lima, Peru.

One thing to keep in mind is the service is in beta right now, so important details like dates of travel haven’t been worked out. Come to think of it, I don’t even know which travel sites they get the data from. That hasn’t stopped rumors that the app has been purchased for $3 million by TripAdvisor.

Want to be a Chinese flight attendant? Don’t bother if you’re not pretty

by Neil Woodburn on

China’s commercial airline industry is expanding as rapidly as its economy. And with it, so too is the same sexism flaunted by Western carriers in the early, heyday of commercial air travel where only the hottest women landed jobs as stewardesses–a sexy, exotic position steeped in international flair and cosmopolitism.

Today, things are different in the West; they’re now called flight attendants and some of them are even men!

China, however, is mired in the 1960s where being an airline stewardesses is still the aspiration of so many pretty women and the apple of desire for every man.

National carriers, such as China Southern, unabashedly promote this image with nothing short of beauty pageants as part of their hiring practice. According to a recent article by Ching-Ching Ni which explores what it takes to be a flight attendant in China, successful applicants must be of certain height, weight, age, and beauty. Those that don’t make the cut can honestly say they’ve been discriminated against.

But, I have to admit, I flew on China Southern earlier this month and the stewardesses, er… I mean flight attendants were all immaculately dressed, extraordinarily attentive, and very pretty.

Hmm, I think the Chinese might be on to something here…

GADLING TAKE FIVE Week of November 11-23

by Catherine Bodry on

Hope everyone had a happy Turkey Day! If you watched the Macy’s parade yesterday, be sure to check out Jamie’s post where she got the inside scoop from a balloon handler’s perspective. And of the many things I was thankful for his Thanksgiving, one of them was that I didn’t have to fly this holiday. I’m wondering if the extra airspace Prez Bush opened over the Eastern corridor eased air traffic at all; we’ll find out soon, I’m sure.

Also this week:

Happy Friday! And if you celebrated Thanksgiving yesterday, happy digesting!

Flight patterns animation

by Catherine Bodry on

Graphic artist Aaron Koblin created an animation based on 24 hours of flight travel data from across the U.S. The results are hypnotic (as is the music) — although it gets a bit wacky at the end, it’s amazing to watch the country light up from east to west as dawn creeps across and air traffic picks up.

This video is low-resolution; you can view a high-resolution version on Koblin’s website. Thanks to the New York Times for the YouTube video link.