Drunk man tries to steal jet fuel for his car

by Jamie Rhein on

Here is a way to not combat high gas prices. Breaking into an airport to steal jet fuel for your car might seem like a good idea, but it’s one of those feats that gains notice–particularly if you’re drunk. At least at the Reid-Hillview Airport near San Jose, California, it does.

This past Sunday a 20-year–old man tried out that exact scenario, but to no avail. He was caught, arrested and charged with breaking into an airport, attempted theft, and to add insult to injury– driving while drunk.

According to the AP article, the plan was foiled before he ever cooked it up. It sounds like you have to buy the gas with a credit card to get it out of the pump.

If he had succeeded, he might have regretted the decision anyway. Unless he had a race car with a special engine, his regular car engine probably would not have liked the jet fuel diet. That’s what I found out when checked out the difference between jet fuel and normal fuel.

How much are those Heathrow landing slots worth?

by Grant Martin on

Now that Open Skies is in full effect, carriers left and right are scrambling to take advantage of all of the sweet landing slots in the EU’s congested airports.

Case in point, London‘s Heathrow Airport. Most travelers flying into the United Kingdom prefer landing at Heathrow because of better connections and proximity to London via the Tube. But landing slots at LHR are all full, so whenever one opens up, competition is hot to fill it in. Similarly, carriers want to hold on to their high-value slots to make sure that any competition doesn’t come in and snatch up some capacity.

So what do you do when you can’t book enough passengers to justify flying in and out of your slot? This case might show up if, say hypothetically, you’ve been cutting capacity like crazy to save cash and demand is low because travel is so expensive. Sound like any economy you know?

In that case, what do you do with your landing slot? Well, according to BMI, or British Midland Airways, you keep flying. Without passengers.

British Airways did the same thing earlier this year to try to preserve landing slots and we figured that the subsequent disgust with their MO combined with the price of fuel would be a deterrent for other carriers to do the same thing. But I guess those slots are just too valuable.

Why not at least auction off the empty seats on the aircraft? I know that you have to pay flight attendants if you have passengers onboard, but I feel like you can make enough to pay a few employees and offset the price of jet fuel a bit. But I guess that would make too much sense.