Embraer Closes Bradley Jet Maintenance Center

Embraer has closed a maintenance facility that it opened less than a year ago at Bradley International Airport to service private jets, Eric Gershon reports in The Hartford Courant. The Brazilian jet manufacturer suggested it might reopen the service center when the economy recovers.

Holy Crap! Not Again With The Stranded Passengers

Last Friday, less than two weeks after the debacle with a commuter jet held on the ground overnight with 47 passengers on board in Minnesota, something quite similar happened at JFK.

Not many people noticed (except the Minneapolis Star Tribune and Arthur Frommer) that 154 passengers were trapped on a Sun Country jet for about six hours at JFK. As the Star Tribune reported:

Once they got off, the passengers complained not only about the delay, but also that they had had to buy their food and water from the airline, and that, even so, provisions quickly ran out.

In response, Sun Country announced a new policy under which it says it will let passengers off a plane after four hours and will stop charging for food after three hours.

Not even close to good enough. We need a law.

Anger, Boycott Talk Persist After Bomber’s Release

The controversy over Scotland’s decision to release the Lockerbie bomber is not dying down, The New York Times reports. Calls for a boycott of Scottish tourism and goods continue.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen boycotts like this one succeed in the short run, as it’s very difficult to measure their impact. But I do believe this incident will harm Scotland’s and Britain’s image — and therefore tourism as well — in the long run.

Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, released to Libya on the grounds that he is terminally ill, served only eight years for the deaths of 270 people, including 189 U.S. citizens, in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The families of the victims are outraged, and the motives for his release are being questioned vigorously, in Britain and the United States.

What an ordinary traveler from the United States might well wonder is this: if I am harmed or killed in Britain, how seriously will that crime be addressed? And if such crimes aren’t severely punished, how much more likely is it that those who want to harm U.S. citizens will do it again?

These a reasonable questions.

Arthur Frommer Stirs Things Up

I just looked at Arthur Frommer’s blog entry from last week about the possibility of a boycott against tourism to Arizona because protesters carried guns to an appearance by President Obama in Phoenix. The entry had 1,123 comments at last count.

After two and a half years, my blog has 1,169 comments. Total.

Getting Back To Nature, Vacations And Our Families

Your faithful blogger wades in Tenaya Creek.

My husband and I spent part of last Tuesday afternoon splashing around Tenaya Creek in Yosemite National Park under the looming splendor of  Half Dome.

Our only company was a young French family, the parents in swimsuits floating lazily with a naked toddler boy and a little girl stripped down to her underwear. It reminded me of nothing more than the idyllic summer camping trips I took as a child with my large family, although being American I guess we probably wore more clothes.

Throughout the park I saw families that reminded me, in attitude if not in size, of my own family in the 1960s and the 70s. And those families were almost all European. Everywhere we went, we heard Italian, French, German and languages I couldn’t identify, as well as British and Australian accents.

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Photo Gallery: Yosemite National Park

I just posted a new gallery from last week’s trip to Yosemite National Park in California:

Half Dome at sunset from Glacier Point, Yosemite National Park.

(You can view large versions of the photos in a gallery by clicking on the first photo and hitting the “next” link under each photo.)

Getting A Better Seat On The Plane

I sat in a dreaded middle seat on a red-eye Friday from Los Angeles to New York. At least my husband was in the aisle seat, so I had somebody familiar to snore and drool on. For those of you with more pride or with less accommodating travel partners, George Hobica at The Airfarewatchdog Blog has some great advice on scoring a better seat.

Photo: Qantas A380 At LAX

Bagged the big one, a photo of a Qantas A380 coming in to land at LAX after a flight from Sydney:

It’s the largest passenger aircraft in the world, and Qantas has it configured to carry 450 people on two decks. Note the double row of windows.

I first saw an A380 nearly two years ago, when Airbus flew one of the prototypes to Bradley to show it to Pratt & Whitney employees who worked on the engines. My video from that flight is available here.

Blame Shifting In Tarmac Stranding

The pilot of the ExpressJet plane that sat overnight on the tarmac at the Rochester, Minn., airport on Aug. 8 tried repeatedly to get permission to let her 47 passengers off the plane, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood writes in his blog.

A DOT investigation shows that a Mesaba Airlines representative improperly refused to let the jet into a gate, LaHood wrote, and the DOT’s Aviation Enforcement Office is now “considering appropriate action to take against Mesaba.”

LaHood also noted that “more senior personnel” at ExpressJet and Continental should have gotten involved to resolve the situation. ExpressJet was operating the flight for Continental.

That’s right. When human beings are sealed in a cramped metal tube and held against their will for hours, it’s a crisis and should be treated as one.

That’s why we must pass an Air Passenger Bill of Rights.

Yosemite National Park Stuns The Senses

It just didn’t seem plausible in the blazing August heat that the water flowing over Yosemite Falls came from some glacier higher up in the Sierra Nevada, but jumping into the icy pool beneath the lower falls removed all doubt.

Refreshing doesn’t begin to describe it. The cold hit me like a hammer. I lasted about 45 seconds before I clambered, shivering, back into the 95-degree heat.

I should not have doubted the glacier story. Rangers don’t  lie.

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