My old friend Chris Guillebeau has just launched a site that’s a handy reference for travelers who want to leverage credit card programs and bonuses for free (or reduced cost) travel, Cards for Travel.  One of the best features is a list of the best credit cards for airline mileage bonuses (note that some of the links on the site are affiliate links, meaning that Chris receives a referral bonus if you sign up for any of the cards).  Definitely worth checking out.

Kayak has pulled together a handy reference chart which recaps the various and sundry fees charged by U.S. airlines.  Click on the excerpt below for a close-up view:

See the entire chart here:  Airline Fees – Kayak

A few days ago a coworker and I went through Security Checkpoint 2 at O’Hare.  Dave was immediately behind me as we approached the conveyer belt for the magnetometer, but after I exited the checkpoint, he took about 2-3 minutes to catch up with me as I waited on the concourse. I’ve written about this in the past, but here are the keys to getting through the TSA checkpoint quickly:

• Wear slip on shoes
• Have your boarding pass handy (see below)
• Put your cell phone, wristwatch, and other similar (metallic) items in a zippered compartment in your bag well before getting to the checkpoint (for me, at the hotel)
• Men: no belt. Leave it in your bag and put it on after the checkpoint
• Car keys need to be inside a zippered compartment in your bag
• 3-1-1 liquids bag in an easily accessible pocket in your bag
• When you pack, do so in an orderly fashion; make it easier on the guy scanning your bag
• Nothing in your pockets except skinny wallet, cash, and boarding pass
• Know upfront how many plastic totes you need. For me, it’s usually one, for my jacket and 3-1-1 bag.  If I’m going to opt to take my laptop out of my bag (see below), I’ll grab a 2nd tote

If the airport is small, or the checkpoint not busy, I take my MacBook Air out of my bag and put it in a plastic tote in the middle of my stuff as it enters the conveyor.  If the checkpoint is busy, I leave it in my bag and let them re-run the bag (and MB Air separately) through if necessary. (Half the time they don’t bother, as it resembles an iPad.)  The LAST thing I want to have happen is to somehow get stuck in the theatrical production while my $1500 laptop is sitting in a plastic tote with a bunch of people milling about.

To this last point:  Be organized and disciplined, and above all else, do NOT let yourself get snagged by the metal detector or backscatter x-ray machine. If you do, your stuff has a much greater chance of walking away with someone else.

Other thoughts:  if the line splits at some point and you have an option of going left or right, go left; more people will opt for going right.  As you approach the magnetometers, look for business travelers and get in that line; avoid (sorry) families, old people, or anyone who looks clueless. They will slow you down.

Finally, I don’t bother retrieving my watch, cell phone, or belt until I’m at my gate.  Travel safe!

A morbid subject no doubt, but I stumbled across a couple of references to air disasters recently, and a remarkable symmetry existed between the two.  First, a passage from Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent Outliers.

In a typical crash, for example, the weather is poor—not terrible, necessarily, but bad enough that the pilot feels a little bit more stressed than usual. In an overwhelming number of crashes, the plane is behind schedule, so the pilots are hurrying. In 52 percent of crashes, the pilot at the time of the accident has been awake for twelve hours or more, meaning that he is tired and not thinking sharply. And 44 percent of the time, the two pilots have never flown together before, so they’re not comfortable with each other. Then the errors start—and it’s not just one error. The typical accident involves seven consecutive human errors. One of the pilots does something wrong that by itself is not a problem. Then one of them makes another error on top of that, which combined with the first error still does not amount to catastrophe. But then they make a third error on top of that, and then another and another and another and another, and it is the combination of all those errors that leads to disaster.

Consider the foregoing as you read a detailed account of the crash of Air France flight 447, which appeared in the December issue of “Popular Mechanics:”  What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447; two excerpts:

At 1h51m, the cockpit becomes illuminated by a strange electrical phenomenon. The co-pilot in the right-hand seat, an inexperienced 32-year-old named Pierre-Cédric Bonin, asks, “What’s that?” The captain, Marc Dubois, a veteran with more than 11,000 hours of flight time, tells him it is St. Elmo’s fire, a phenomenon often found with thunderstorms at these latitudes.

At approximately 2 am, the other co-pilot, David Robert, returns to the cockpit after a rest break. At 37, Robert is both older and more experienced than Bonin, with more than double his colleague’s total flight hours. The head pilot gets up and gives him the left-hand seat. Despite the gap in seniority and experience, the captain leaves Bonin in charge of the controls.

At 2:02 am, the captain leaves the flight deck to take a nap. Within 15 minutes, everyone aboard the plane will be dead.]

About ten minutes later:

But once the computer lost its airspeed data, it disconnected the autopilot and switched from normal law to “alternate law,” a regime with far fewer restrictions on what a pilot can do. “Once you’re in alternate law, you can stall the airplane,” Camilleri says.

It’s quite possible that Bonin had never flown an airplane in alternate law, or understood its lack of restrictions. According to Camilleri, not one of US Airway’s 17 Airbus 330s has ever been in alternate law. Therefore, Bonin may have assumed that the stall warning was spurious because he didn’t realize that the plane could remove its own restrictions against stalling and, indeed, had done so.

02:10:55 (Robert) Putain!
Damn it!

Another of the pitot tubes begins to function once more. The cockpit’s avionics are now all functioning normally. The flight crew has all the information that they need to fly safely, and all the systems are fully functional. The problems that occur from this point forward are entirely due to human error.

02:11:03 (Bonin) Je suis en TOGA, hein?
I’m in TOGA, huh?

Bonin’s statement here offers a crucial window onto his reasoning. TOGA is an acronym for Take Off, Go Around. When a plane is taking off or aborting a landing—”going around”—it must gain both speed and altitude as efficiently as possible. At this critical phase of flight, pilots are trained to increase engine speed to the TOGA level and raise the nose to a certain pitch angle.

…it gets worse, trust me.  As travelers, I’m not sure what we can do with all of this, other than hope we have experienced, level headed pilots at the controls (see related article).  The Popular Mechanics article is equal parts fascinating and terrifying; despite the uncomfortable subject, I recommend you check it out.

A wonderful Vanity Fair article by Charles C. Mann neatly summarizes the absurdity of airport security; a brief excerpt:

From an airplane-hijacking point of view, Schneier said, al-Qaeda had used up its luck. Passengers on the first three 9/11 flights didn’t resist their captors, because in the past the typical consequence of a plane seizure had been “a week in Havana.” When the people on the fourth hijacked plane learned by cell phone that the previous flights had been turned into airborne bombs, they attacked their attackers. The hijackers were forced to crash Flight 93 into a field. “No big plane will ever be taken that way again, because the passengers will fight back,” Schneier said.

You can read the entire article here:  Smoke Screening