Air France plane lost

An Air France A330 aircraft, on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, reportedly experienced electrical problems after encountering stormy weather over the Atlantic. The aircraft has not been heard from for over 12 hours. The last known contact with the aircraft was at roughly on Monday morning about two and half hours after takeoff. The aircraft was outside of radar coverage when it disappeared. There were about 216 passengers and 12 crew members on board.

Orbitz slip-up didn't fly

The Barshack family's trip to San Francisco went well until it was time to go home.

That's when Evan Barshack went online to print out the family's boarding passes for the flight, booked months earlier through Orbitz, an online travel service.

He found out that the Sun Country Airlines flight from San Francisco to Minneapolis-St. Paul had been canceled and rescheduled several weeks earlier. Their return flight actually had left the night before. Barshack had to find something else.

"We were staying with my brothers, and we had just moved (to the Twin Cities) from San Francisco, so we had plenty of people to hang out with," Barshack said. But that was about the only thing Barshack, his wife, Jennifer, and their then-3-year-old son, Mikey, had going for them.

Their trip home ended up taking two days longer than planned. Ultimately, the adventure didn't reach some resolution until earlier this month, when a referee in Ramsey County Conciliation Court sided with Barshack in his claim against Orbitz and the travel service sent him a check for $1,628.51.

Barshack is a law school graduate but doesn't practice. He teaches business law at Century College in White Bear Lake and said the trip through conciliation — or small claims — court "was pretty fun, actually."

His experience also is a lesson for travelers to check their flights in advance, and what to do when one is rescheduled at the last minute.

On the Saturday morning in March 2008, when Barshack found out the family's return flight had been rescheduled, he called Sun Country. The airline didn't offer a flight from San Francisco to MinneapolisSt. Paul airport until the following Thursday, five days away. And it didn't have agreements with other airlines the family could tap to fly home.
"So I had (Sun Country) get Orbitz on the line," Barshack said. For flights booked through an agent, such as Orbitz, airlines commonly say it's the agent's responsibility to notify fliers of the change.

The Orbitz representative said the online travel service wasn't notified of the schedule change by Sun Country, Barshack said. When Sun Country noted two dates on which it had notified Orbitz, Barshack said the Orbitz representative hung up.

"Probably if Orbitz hadn't hung up on me, I probably wouldn't have gone through with this," Barshack said.

Orbitz is a 9-year-old online travel service based in Chicago. It generated $870 million in revenue last year but lost $299 million. Losses are continuing, hitting $336 million in the first three months of this year alone as revenue declined.

Barshack now has the check in hand from Orbitz for $1,628, but said he isn't cashing it and is asking the court to take another look. He thinks the amount awarded doesn't match what the judgment's language intended.

Because the case is still technically open, Orbitz declined to comment specifically on Barshack's case.

"We went through the judicial process; we agreed to pay," said Brian Hoyt, an Orbitz spokesman. "If there was a breakdown of some sort," Hoyt added, "it's unfortunate, and we're willing to agree to the judge's decision and move on."

Barshack said the Sun Country representative on the phone was helpful and came up with a plan to get the Barshacks home. They found a $99 one-way flight on Southwest Airlines between San Francisco and Los Angeles, and then got on a Sun Country red-eye from Los Angeles to the Twin Cities.

Back in St. Paul, Barshack filed his case in conciliation court, listing the cost of the airline tickets and expenses, with an out-of-pocket total of $2,034.71. Orbitz contacted him and offered to settle, he said, but the two couldn't agree on a figure.

That led to an appearance in front of the court referee late last month. Orbitz claimed the Ramsey County court didn't have jurisdiction in the case. But the referee disagreed, noting that the lengthy customer agreement on Orbitz's Web site is "wildly disproportionate to the amount of time any consumer user might reasonably be expected to expend" in reading the terms.

The referee, Daniel Kleinberger, who is also a professor at William Mitchell College of Law, wrote that Orbitz "had a contractual obligation to notify Mr. Barshack of the schedule change." He wrote that evidence showed Sun Country did notify Orbitz of the change.

Ultimately, the referee awarded Barshack the $1,628.51. That was the total of Barshack's claim, minus half the cost of the three Sun Country tickets, or $466.

Barshack said he normally visits second-party travel Web sites, such as Orbitz, to find the lowest fares. But then he books the flights at the carriers' own Web sites.

For consumers who want to avoid the dilemma the Barshacks encountered, Bob Jones, a Michigan-based travel expert, advises checking a flight's status every four to five days, particularly if you booked far in advance.

Schedule changes are less common in the days just prior to a flight, unless weather or mechanical problems come into play, he said.

Another tip experts offer: If you're online, confirm the schedule of your return flight as you print a boarding pass for the initial flight.

Source:TwinCities.com
John Welbes: jwelbes@pioneerpress.com

JetAmerica ticket sales are off to flying start

JetAmerica ticket sales are off to flying start
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Mexico flights cancelled

Major european tour operators have cancelled fights to Mexico in light of the outbreak of swine flu. Thomson, First Choice and Thomas Cook have all cancelled their services to Cancun and are flying customers already in Mexico back to the UK.
Kuoni has suspended holidays to Mexico but normal booking conditions apply to all departures from May 4 onwards. "Customers currently on holiday in Mexico are being looked after by our local representative in resort," said the operator.
British Airways is continuing to operate its four weekly flights to Mexico, saying it was up to travellers to decide if their tripl is essential. Read More>>

Airport get´s $800000 stimulus money has no traffic

John Murtha airport - the $150 Million facility for 20 passengers a day
by Scott Carmichael on Apr 26th 2009 at 2:00PM

Which US airport has a reinforced concrete runway capable of handling any kind of plane in the country, a $14 Million hangar, a $7 Million control tower and an $8 Million radar installation?

No, it isn't O'Hare or LAX. It's the John Murtha Johnstown-Cambria County Airport, airport, JST for short.

This disgrace of an airport has been sucking in an insane $150 Million in tax payer money in the past decade, all to serve a measly 20 passengers a day.

Read more:>>>

Ryanair no good news

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkKPirksymQ

Comment from one of the Youtube member looking at this lengthy video:

................The funny thing is this low cost quick turn around does not have to be done unsafely. Southwest Airlines does the same thing in the US and has a good relationship with crew and an excellent safety record.

Ryanair deserves to be run out of business.

You made your flight but your luggage not

Ever wonder why your luggage doesn't make your flight even though you do? And even when it seems there was more than enough time for it to have done so? Well, this airline manager of over seven years can give you some insight as to why the bag containing all your prized possessions was left on the ramp or back in the luggage assembly area rather than put on board your flight.
Some of the reasons for why that very expensive Tumi garment bag of yours never made the flight, as we say in the industry, can seem nonsensical or even downright sinister, but they're really not. Well, okay...the nonsensical thing I make no promises about. But in 99.99 percent of all cases, there's nothing actually sinister going on, so you have that going for you, I guess.
It's just that sometimes, despite the best efforts of almost everybody involved in the luggage process, some employee somewhere along the line might fail to load the bag. We call all luggage bags, by the way, not luggage.
Consider the above lesson Number One in the airline jargon class. Learn to use it correctly, and you might be able to buffalo an airline luggage service agent into going the extra mile to try to find the bag, after it's been mis-connected and doesn't show up down at the bag claim area.
After your bag has been tagged (and make sure it's tagged all the way to your final destination), it usually undergoes a process called induction. No, this isn't some military thing, where your bag ends up in Vietnam, slinging a rifle in some real-life Oliver Stone war movie. It's actually the point where you no longer have any control over what's done to the bag, and by whom. It'll now go through a maze of laser encoders and bar code readers, and will usually make it to the proper bag makeup room almost every single time.
You just heard a term in the previous paragraph you may not understand, and that's bag makeup. In large airports and hubs, there could be a few dozen of these rooms. They all have as their mission the receipt of bags which have gone through that maze before landing in the tender hands of some airline baggage handler working down below the ticket counter areas.
Take a moment to picture the complexity of such a system. There are literally miles of conveyors and input-output belts, all plopping bags down at various points along the way. If you think there's a better way to do it, by all means patent it and then contact the airlines. They'd love to hear from you. But in an airport in which hundreds of flights a day leave, to many destinations, it's the best way to handle bag sortation.
And bag sortation is where it can all go wrong for your travel case. It could get sorted to the wrong bag makeup room (we call them piers) and then be sent to what's called "re-route." Oftentimes, the bag will still make your flight, just like you did.
But sometimes, after lying around in the wrong pier for awhile, it just can't be re-routed to your flight in time. This is even though almost every airline employee I ever worked with out on the airline tarmac busted his or her behind to try to get it to your plane.
To be honest, though, there are just some occasions when a baggage handler will flat-out forego a chance to load the bag, especially if it comes out in the last three minutes before scheduled departure. Believe me, also, when I say the only thing airlines hate as much as leaving bags off flights is a plane leaving the gate past departure time.
Hey, aircraft don't make an airline any money sitting on the ground, usually. No, they need to be in the air, flying many routes over the course of a business day. And your bag may become a casualty of the triage process in order to preserve on time.
So, though it may be cold comfort if your bag didn't make the flight, know that airlines handle hundreds of thousands of them a day. And the vast majority will make it onto their designated flights and to their final destinations. Hold onto that fact when or if your bag doesn't show up at the baggage claim carousels, and you might not pop a blood vessel in rage. Or you might. The choice is yours.
Source: EzineArticles.com