Virgin America unrolls fresh spring food selections

by Grant Martin on

If you’re sick of the same old chicken or beef + wine or sugar water for your in flight meal, you’re not alone. Many people in the green revolution are moving towards healthier and fitter food selections, and the same old peanuts, pretzels and diet coke aren’t cutting it.

To find any creative meal content, however, you’re going to have to step away from the legacy carriers. Leading the effort, Virgin America, recently redesigned their spring in-flight menu to include options for the health conscious travelers.

Those traveling in Coach will now be able to select fruit and cheese, spring spinach salads, hummus and pita chips, wild berry parfait and mandarin chicken hand rolls among a host of other delectable options.

Guests in First get more mouth water options, including maple roasted chicken, barbecue lamb cutlets and braised beef with peas, feta and nuts. Yum. Take a look at the first class options in the gallery below, and hope that the other carriers tune in and kick up their food offerings as well.

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How to destroy V Australia’s $23M flight simulator

by Grant Martin on

I thought that I was the luckiest person in the world when Ken Pascoe and Marty Khoury, two pilots from V Australia invited me, a lowly blogger, out to visit them and their flight simulator out in Australia last week. Sure, I edit a travel blog and I do run Linux, but that usually can only get me so far.

So I was thrilled to accept the invitation and join the crew out in Silverwater, just outside of Sydney, last Monday. As I detailed last week, Ken picked me up at the train station and showed me around the CAE facility and cockpit, then the safety briefing started.

“Should we lose power and the gangway not extend to the sim, the escape hatch and rope are just outside of the cockpit,” Ken explained.

“Furthermore, if anything goes wrong during the flight, emergency stop buttons are here, here and here.” He pointed to a spot next to each seat and to two on the wall of the cockpit. “But you won’t have to hit those — I’ll have probably already reset the system once you realize something has gone wrong. Now, grab a seat.”

Pulling my SLR camera out of its bag and stepping towards the left seat, I paused, and turned to my companion, thinking that it would be best for me to film part of the experience before taking my turn. And that’s when the lights turned off and everything ground to a halt. Think of the noise you hear when a subway or train shuts down, it’s eerily quiet and something doesn’t sound right. Or the sound of broken dreams. That’s the one. I had pressed the emergency stop button with my shoulder when I turned around.
Note, that there are two emergency stop buttons on the wall of the cockpit: there’s the “turn off the movement and relax” stop and then there’s the “pull the plug on thirty computers, rip the circuit boards from the machine and stomp on them” stop. That second one is the one that I pressed.

“No worries,” said Ken, “this has happened before.” And as we left the cockpit, he gave a nervous chuckle. “We’ll be up in no time.”

Ah, but we weren’t. After an hour of pulling circuit boards out of the machine, two techs determined that they might have to order another board. My session and a later, real pilot’s session were definitely canceled.

Later that evening I got a text message from Ken saying that they figured out the problem after replacing two circuit boards, and that I should swing back as soon as I could. But by that point I was already headed towards Auckland.

Maybe next time, V Australia.

Inside V Australia’s Boeing 777 flight simulator

by Grant Martin on

When I was invited out to visit V Australia‘s 777 on it’s maiden voyage from Seattle – Los Angeles – Sydney earlier this year, poor Amanda Bolger from public relations had no idea what she was signing up for. Sitting in the cockpit with Ken Pascoe, the pater familias of VA pilots, we took a couple of photos and he casually mentioned “Hey, if you come out to Sydney we should take out the simulator.”

Oh, but I was coming to Sydney, Ken, and after a few pestering emails, he finally gave in and invited us to come out to Silverwater, just outside of the city to take the simulator out for a spin.

Meeting Ken out at the Strathfield station earlier this week, we drove up to CAE, where V Australia had a small suite of offices and a simulator installed in a rear, cavernous room. This is where all VA pilots train, both in instrumentation at a computer console and in actual flight operation, inside of the 23 million dollar simulator.

The front of the cockpit is replicated in exact detail to a “white tail” aircraft, a generic 777 that still hasn’t got the exact installed features of VA equipment. A little bit later next month, they’ll be making those upgrades. Behind the pilot and co-pilot seats are an additional three seats where an instructor and observers can curate the flight.

As far as operation, Marty Khoury, another V Australia pilot on hand explained that the graphics and performance are so lifelike, even to the bump of every light in the runway, that sometimes the pilots forget that they’re even inside of the simulator.

So how did Gadling’s flight experience go? Disasterously. But I’ll tell you about that next week.

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Fly to Australia for free?

by Mike Barish on

The recession is not just an American problem. The economies of Europe and Asia are struggling as well. And, Australia is feeling the slowdown now, too. What does that mean for us? Potential travel deals in the future. The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting Virgin’s interest in participating in a program that would offer free flights for foreign travelers heading to Australia.

The Mayday Project was proposed by Glenn Millen, the innovation direction of Independent Tourism Holdings. Recipients of the free flights would be required to spend a minimum amount of money in Australian hotels, shops and restaurants. When asked if Virgin would be interested in the program, Virgin Blue’s chief executive, Brett Godfrey, said, “Sure we would be. I don’t see a lot of downside in it for the tourism industry at all. In fact, I see nothing but positives.”

These are the types of win-win ideas that help generate business and allow people who are on strict budgets to still enjoy life. It also is not unprecedented Down Under. After World War II, the Australian government offered Ten Pound Pom fares, which were low-cost fares for British citizens traveling to Australian in order to entice people to migrate permanently. Australia, at the time, was seeking to increase its population and viable workforce.

Difficult times call for innovative ideas, and few airlines have been as innovative as Virgin. Qantas is less eager to get involved in the Mayday Project at this time. Still, this remains something to keep an eye on. You can be sure that we’ll update you as we learn more.

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Score some $500 tickets to Australia with STA Travel

by Grant Martin on

Jealous of all of those blokes who got in on the first round of tickets to Oz on V Australia? It’s true, some of us snagged sub $500 fares to Australia late last year when The Pacific’s newest airline started selling tickets, but it’s not too late to cash in your chips.

The latest installment in STA Travel’s “fast finger fares” give students one last chance to score that dream vacation down under. As a bonus, a welcome package with two nights of (dorm style) lodging, meals and extras is also included in the price. That’s a steal. So how do you get in?

  • Twenty packages will available at exactly 12PM on Monday, the 9th of March. That’s tomorrow.
  • You can only book the packages by going to your local STA travel or by calling (800) 360.9273, so you either need to get to your local office and sit on a travel agent or use four cellphones and call non stop starting at 11:58. Yes, you can wear your Kappa Kappa Gamma sweatpants to the STA office. No, they don’t make your butt look big.

In the worst case scenario, if you miss out on the twenty best deals, STA still has Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne on sale from Los Angeles for about $650, which isn’t a bad deal.

You can read more about the sale at STAtravel.com.

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