Airlines had fewer runway close calls, down 50%

by Tom Johansmeyer on

The federal fiscal year just came to a close, and that means it’s time for a look-back by government agencies. Well, the FAA has some good news for us: runway near-misses fell 50 percent, registering a second consecutive year of drops. There were six serious runway incursions in fiscal year 2010, the FAA says, down from 12 in fiscal year 2009.

This represents incredible progress from 2000, in which there were a whopping 67 close calls. The move in the right direction is in part because of efforts by federal regulators and airports, reports USA Today.

Okay, let’s all breathe a sigh of relief.

[photo by as737700 via Flickr]

Airline passengers want more self-service options

by Tom Johansmeyer on

Hey, airlines: passengers don’t want your help. Seriously. We’d rather take control of our fates. Let us make our own choices and pay for what we consume.

Well, that’s what a new survey reveals. The fifth annual SITA/Air Transport World Passenger Self-Service Survey finds that air travelers would like a bit more independence. Seventy percent, this year, want automatic boarding gates – where scanning a boarding pass opens a turnstile – up from 57 percent. In fact, self-service is already the norm, with more than 70 percent using airport kiosks for flight check-in, and two-thirds want to see expanded kiosk use, including: paying baggage fees, purchasing meals, printing bag tags and getting delayed luggage.

I guess this provides support for that old saying: if you want it done right …

[photo by joiseyshowaa via Flickr]

Study abroad, major in getting drunk

by Tom Johansmeyer on

Your kids are getting wasted on your dime. Forget about the new cultures, unusual experiences and memories and lessons that will last well into a young person’s life. Instead, shots off some hottie’s very tight stomach are far more likely.

Researchers at the University of Washington found that students who study abroad are more likely to increase how much alcohol they drink – more than doubling their intake, on average College kids studying in Europe, Australia and New Zealand are the spots where imbibing increased most.

So, how could this possibly happen? According to the Associated Press, “Students reported drinking more when they perceived their fellow travelers were drinking more heavily, and those who planned to make drinking part of their cultural immersion did so.”

Of course, these programs provide a real opportunity for underage drinkers, which is why this group’s intake grew by 170 percent, compared to the average of 105 percent.

Fortunately, the study abroad experience is not transformative … at least not in this regard. On average, the students doubling their drinking while away from home came back and settled into a routine of three to five drinks a week.

[Via Gawker, photo by Mike Burns via Flickr]

Fallen American Airlines could be next to merge … with JetBlue?

by Tom Johansmeyer on

American Airlines used to be the largest airline in the industry – now it’s third. Merger activity has narrowed the field, with Southwest–AirTran and United-Continental the latest deals that hit the sector. So, all eyes are on who will succumb to the urge to merge next, and American is being eyed as the next player.

According to a Forbes blog post, analysts from Morningstar believe that American Airlines “needs to make a big splash” to remain a player in an increasingly competitive market. The post continues:

“Once the industry’s largest carrier, [American Airlines] is now the third-largest…and any scale advantage it may have garnered is gone,” the Morningstar analysts write. “Ironically, AMR is at a substantial disadvantage, given that it steered clear of bankruptcy during the recession,” [Basili] Alukos and [Adam] Fleck say, pointing out that American’s labor rate is the industry’s highest on an equivalent basis.

So, who’s the right partner for American? The analysts at Morningstar are looking at JetBlue, especially given the latter’s “lighter cost structure.” Notes founder of Training the Street and former M&A investment banker Scott Rostan, “Three dominoes have fallen – Delta/Northwest, UAL/Continental and Southwest/AirTran.” He sees Alaska, Frontier and JetBlue as likely to make some noise.

[photo by Andrew Morrell Photography via Flickr]

Pondering the Persistence of Pork on New York’s Pig Island

by David Farley on

I once witnessed a pig creep out of an open barn door, into the robust morning sunlight, only to get stabbed in the back of its neck by an electric cattle prod. The sow didn’t go down easy, though, as the prod was unplugged and the beast was back up on its feet, its ear-piercing squeals of imminent death ringing out in the Czech countryside. Eventually, porky succumbed and, between forced shots of slivovice (a plum brandy), I watched my friend Libor and his family and friends dismantle the hog. And then, of course, I participated in consuming it. The day-long porcine feast started with the pig’s brains on toast, then a blood soup, then sausages and deep-fried fat, followed by so much more meat and slivovice that it all became one porklicious blur. When I wrote an article about the experience and sent it out to travel publications, the only responses I received were angry rants from editors asking rhetorical questions about my sanity. (I eventually did get a positive response and the article was published and went on to win a Lowell Thomas travel writing award.)

The reason, I think, it was met with so much initial hostility was that it touched on a subject most Americans were not comfortable with: where our food comes from (literally watching how our sausages get made). The pig killers in question, my friend Libor and his family, partook in this particular swine slaughter every November, as dictated by Czech tradition. They would raise the beast in the barn, from piglet to plus-sized swine, and then kill it and eat it. One take away from witnessing this time-honored Central European ritual was how far American eaters had moved away from this realistic, get-your-hands-dirty approach to our food.

But something has happened between then and now. Case in point: I recently visited Pig Island, a pork fest of beastly proportions that took place on New York’s Governor’s Island. They weren’t slaughtering pigs there, but the place was packed with hungry hog eaters, as almost two dozen New York chefs were there to serve up variations on the theme of sow, with ingredients listed by local farms. I’m in favor of this movement, but I wondered: why has pork been elevated to the foodie farm animal of choice in the last few years?For starters, let’s take a broad view of recent eating history. Besides a handful of books and documentaries focused on where our food comes from, we’ve finally embraced locavore-ism, a food movement that advocates using local ingredients and paying more attention to its provenance. It’s been part of the Bay Area dining landscape for decades — thanks, in part, to Alice Waters – and it just took hold in New York City.

Which is where pork comes in. Pigs have become the main ingredient — the poster pig, if you will — of the locavore movement. Hipsters have embraced bacon as their breakfast (or lunch or diner) of champions. Pig parts like brains, heart, tongue and offal — real Czech pig-killing fare — have popped up on menus from Manhattan to the Mission District. Some chefs, such as April Bloomfield of the Spotted Pig and the Breslin in New York and Ben Ford of Ford’s Filling Station in Culver City, CA. have been especially prolific in their use of pork.

Another is Sara Jenkins, the chef behind beloved Porchetta, located in the New York’s East Village, and soon-to-open Porsena. Fittingly enough, she was the first chef I encountered at Pig Island. “Pork was marketed wrong – remember ‘The Other White Meat?’ – and we really stopped caring about it,” she said, handing out tinfoil-wrapped porchetta sandwiches to the crowd. “But about 15 years ago farmers started taking interest in it again.”

Adam Schop, chef at the new pan-Latin eatery Nuela, who was serving up a pig terrine, expanded on Jenkins’ thoughts when I asked him later in the day about pork’s popularity. For him, it was all about one word: heritage. “Finally pigs are heritage and that’s important because now we can cultivate certain breeds.” And by heritage, he means that pigs went from being only factory farmed where they were bred to produce lean meat with a result that was often dry and bland and just plain not good to farmers trying to revive different breeds of pigs, swine that has a different taste and texture and are treated better.

“But,” added Schop, “this whole trend might be chef driven. We’re on the front lines and we often cook what we like.”

If that’s the case, are we starting to see a pork backlash? After all, I saw zero amounts of bacon at Pig Island. Jimmy Carbone, Pig Island’s organizer and owner of the East Village gastropub, Jimmy’s no. 43, doesn’t think so. Besides, he told me, the chefs at Pig Island had no time to cure bacon, putting to rest any trepidation of a bacon or pork backlash. Super chef Daniel Boulud, though, could be the canary: he recently went on record saying he hopes to open a restaurant next year in which there will be no pork on the menu.

I spent the rest of the day munching my way through Pork Island, snacking on pork tacos, pork buns, pork stew, pork sausages, pork and kimchi tacos, root beer-glazed pork, jerk pork, roasted pork, slow-cooked pork, and various pork pates. If the frenzy for all things swine dies down, I certainly got my fill in one day.