Flying Green

by Iva Skoch on

It’s been on my mind lately. How much harm are we doing to the environment, flying around in fuel-guzzling jumbo jets? Being a large city dweller, I haven’t owned a car for years. However, I’ll jet around any chance I get.

On a per-passenger basis, flying is still less damaging than driving. (Here’s a nifty carbon calculator to see how much CO2 your next flight will generate.) However, airplanes do burn a lot of fuel and generally push pollutants up higher in the atmosphere than cars (the effects of which are being debated).

Fortunately, there is some hope for the guilty-minded. Some companies are offering the ability to pay for carbon-sequestering, sometimes by paying to have trees planted to offset carbon emissions, including Myclimate.org and TerraPass. Information about these programs is available on the web, including recent articles in the NY Times and Wired, and MyClimate’s site carbonoffsets.org.

Expedia, apparently, now offers to sell you offsets directly, charging $5.99 per 1,000 pounds of CO2, or about the amount from a 2,200 mile flight.

Welcome Aboard, Enjoy Your Flight

by Iva Skoch on

This week’s Economist had a great short piece (sorry, subscription only online) where they quoted a fictitious, but factual, in-flight service announcement, from “Veritas Airways.” The idea was that those largely-ignored, repetitive, pre-take-off announcements–that we’ve all memorized like something from catechism class–were less than truthful. I happened to be reading it just as the flight attendant was demonstrating that ever-so useful ‘proper method’ for buckling my seat belt.

There were some gems. For example: “Your life-jacket can be found under your seat, but please do not remove it now. In fact, do not bother to look for it at all. In the event of a landing on water, an unprecedented miracle will have occurred, because in the history of aviation the number of wide-bodied aircraft that have made successful landings on water is zero.”

Luckily, we had not yet reached cruising altitude and the drink cart had not yet come around with the beverage service, or else I would have snorted the contents of my plastic cup of cola through my nose while reading the article. Fortunately, my squirming with laughter was probably enough to ward off deep-vein thrombosis–at least on that flight.

Tweaking the Carry On List

by Erik Olsen on

During the frantic no-liquids-on-planes crisis recently we learned that pretty much any kind of liquid or balm was illegal to bring on board a plane. If you happened to be traveling at this time, then chances are you had to dump something, whether it was lipstick or some deodorant or whatever. Well, now we’re all a bit more calmed down the good folks at the FAA have relaxed things a bit, and have loosened the stringent requirements of what can and cannot be brought on board.

According to this CNN report, travelers can now take up to four ounces of non-prescription medicine, glucose gel for diabetics, solid lipstick and baby food. I didn’t read here whether solid lipstick meant chap stick, of serious importance to many of us who are addicted to the stuff, but I hope so. Oh, as and you might imagine, all aerosols are prohibited.