Gadling

I ran across an interesting article on detective Kevin Coffey’s website which lists specific information regarding your flight in which the pilot must provide. For instance, you can ask:

• Are you licensed, rated and current for this flight?
• Have you checked the weight and balance of the aircraft?
• Have you obtained a weather forecast?
• Have you filed a flight plan?
• Should I make alternative arrangements or reschedule due to bad weather?

This seems more like stuff you’d ask the pilot of a smaller, private aircraft, but I wonder if this applies commercial pilots as well? Also included in the article are things you can’t ask a pilot:

• To carry a payload beyond the weight and balance limitations of the aircraft
• To takeoff or land at an airstrip which is less than the length required by the aircraft
• To fly below 500 feet, except for takeoff or landing
• To fly into weather he or she considers unsafe or against regulations
• To fly beyond allowable duty time limits
• To take risks by continuing a flight for the sake of meeting one of your prior commitments

I can think of some other things you can’t ask a pilot, like “Will you fly this thing upside-down?” or “Can I open the window?” If they say no, I’ll just whip out my printed list from Kevin Coffey’s website and say, “Yeah, well too bad. You have to.”

Here is a great new website that needs just a little bit of help to get it going.

WikiAir.com will one day be a very cool site to visit whenever you expect to be in an airport. The idea is that anyone who has tips on the best things an airport has to offer, such as free WiFi or best places to sleep, will write up their recommendations and post it on the site.

Unfortunately, the site is still too new to have enough relevant data quite yet. For example, I visited the LAX link, a place I tend to spend a lot of time, and there was nothing other than a listing of which airlines flew into which terminals. It was a little disappointing. I plan, however, to check back in a few months to see what cool insider tips travelers have posted.

In the event that a baby is born at 30,000 feet, what’s his or her citizenship? Interesting question.

If you read my earlier post on debunking the myth of free flying for life if a baby is born in-flight, I talked about an Egyptian woman flying from London to Boston who gave birth to a baby on board a British Airways flight which was rerouted to Nova Scotia. So we’ve got Egypt, United Kingdom, United States, and Canada all involved. What citizenship is awarded? It depends on the country, and in the United States, laws vary from state to state and even county to county.

“The state of Texas offers excellent details on how to document an in-air birth on a plane bound for Texas, even if the birth takes place over, say, Australia,” says Howstuffworks.com. “Using a Texas birth certificate, you fill in the county and city of birth with the county and city where the child was first removed from the plane, and you should include a citation of where the birth shows up in the aircraft’s flight log. For the location of the structure where the birth occurred (which is typically the city and county of a hospital), the county should be ‘In flight,’ and the city should be the name and flight number of the aircraft and the latitude and longitude coordinates of the point over which the child entered the world.”

Weird. Even more strange is the alarming number of births that happen on planes each year. I couldn’t find any data for all airlines across the world, but British Airways says they usually have at least one kid born every year in-flight!