Going to Texas? Maybe not this weekend.

by Grant Martin on

Continental just suspended all of its flights in and out of Houston through Saturday pending results from Hurricane Ike, which is currently barreling towards the Gulf coast.

Naturally, Mother Nature will be disrupting your plans if you’re flying through Texas this weekend, or even through the heartland over the course of the week, as the storm works its way into the breadbasket and disperses through the country.

Under tropical storm and hurricane conditions, any normal airline usually implements a weather waiver, whereby you can log onto their website, tweak your itinerary and pick a few different flights You can check out Continental’s website here for rebooking strategies.

Meanwhile, if you want to take a look at the time line of the storm check out the interactive page over at MSNBC. It’s got a great detail of where the storm started and the path and intensity of the storm up until now.

Good luck this weekend, Houston. We’ll see you on the other side.

Video of 747 struck by lightning

by Grant Martin on

It’s nice to know that if your 747 gets struck with 40 kiloamperes of electricity that it can keep on trucking. Aircraft are designed to withstand lightning strikes (if not multiple lightning strikes), although various small amounts of damage can occur. As one 747-400 pilot at the Professional Pilots Rumor Network (pprune) commented, “the auto-pilot dropped out and a few minor systems were temporarily lost” after a lightning strike on his aircraft, but shortly after that everything resumed.

Lightning strikes happen fairly often on commercial aircraft, but rarely is the event caught on film. This ANA 747 was hit just after take off, which can be a critical time during operation, but everyone and the aircraft survived just fine.

Beijing Weathers the Weather and Pollution

by Josh Lew on

On August 8th, while the opening ceremonies were in progress, Chinese meteorologists had their eyes on the sky.

In the days before the Olympics, Beijing assembled its own Olympic-caliber weather team, choosing the cream of the crop from a pool of over 200 meteorologists. At one point on the evening of the ceremonies, the chief of these weather superstars, Guo Hu, ordered rockets to be fired to disperse rain clouds that seemed to be headed for the Bird’s Nest.

But the hot and hazy weather that came with the lack of rain was stifling. Though the air quality was better in Beijing than before the Games, the haze was still prevalent enough to cause concern. Some of the city panoramas broadcast by NBC on August 9th showed a haze that made Los Angeles look like the fresh air capital of the world.That’s probably why there were no rockets shot at rain clouds on August 10th and 11th. Not only did the rain ease the nearly 100-degree heat of the previous day, it doused the smog as well. Even as competitors in the women’s bicycle road race were skidding across pools of standing water on the roadway and crashing into water-filled ditches, commentators and athletes were commenting on how pleasant the air was. The air pollution index on the rainy days reached 38, well below the rating of 50 that the World Health Organization deems acceptable. By contrast, the pollution score was in the 70s last Saturday, well above the acceptable mark set out by WHO.

Xinhua News Agency, China’s official press outlet, says another round of rain will wash Beijing’s air over the coming weekend.

Thus far, the visiting members of the press have not made a big deal about the pollution. Most of the “glamor events” of the Games have been held indoors. When gymnastics and swimming end, the focus will be on the outdoor events of track and field. If the pollution index is high during the Olympic marathon, we may be seeing athletes don masks to keep the smog out of their lungs. Ethiopian Haile Gebrselassie, once the favorite to win the 26.2 mile race, has already dropped out, citing worries about the dirty air.

American Airlines flight cancelled due to booing passengers

by Grant Martin on

People love to get angry and take sides when things turn south during air travel. If you don’t believe me, go to Flyertalk.com, click on ANY forum, click on ANY thread, and you’ll probably see a labor vs. management or passenger vs. airline dispute.

These disputes come into particular focus during delays. Whether mechanical or weather related, it always seems like there are a dozen armchair pilots sitting in the crowd saying something like “It’s just a landing gear locking pin! Who needs that? I’m going to miss my connection!”

Just last week in Providence I sat next to a guy howling because the weather was fine in Providence and there was a weather delay. What he didn’t realize was that there was a ring of thunderstorms around the airport causing traffic. Not right above us.

Passengers on a recent American Airlines flight were so fired up from a delay in their crew showing up that they actually booed the employees when they boarded the plane. The pilots and flight attendants were so miffed that they canceled the flight, stranding passengers in Miami overnight.

Now who is the villain here? Nobody deserves to be booed at, especially when you’re just doing your job and connected in from a late flight. But as a rule, passengers don’t really know the full details of what’s going on so we can expect them to act like a fussy mob. Especially if your job is to deal with passengers all day. Should you have really canceled the flight?

It’s a close one, but I’m going with the passengers on this one.

[Via Gothamist]

Everything you ever wanted to know about weather delays

by Grant Martin on

Doesn’t it seem like whenever a drop of rain falls on the New York City tarmac that all flight delays skyrocket? Well, it’s not your imagination. We now have numbers to prove it!

WeatherBill just came out with their seasonal report on air traffic congestion related to weather, tallying up all of the airlines from a DOT list and comparing them against airports, weather and subsequent delays. They found some pretty interesting data, noting that weather delays are worst handled in New York City and best handled in San Jose and Phoenix. Interestingly, they also found that Jetblue and Continental, two airlines with hubs in the City seem to handle weather delays best among carriers, perhaps because they’re so experienced with inclement weather.

All of these data are pretty interesting, but do we really need a third party to tell us that delays go up as a function of bad weather? Most people would think that this was kind of obvious.

But Weatherbill isn’t marketing the obvious numbers to buyers. Their niche is in the formulas predicting how delayed flights will be as a function of the weather. If airlines know this well, they can manage loads better and create fewer delays — saving them money and the passenger time. Everyone wins, right?
Got some time to read 58 pages of charts and data? Check out the full report here, or check out the lazyman’s version here.