The U.S. Department of Transportation is currently evaluating a “lengthy series of requests” from major airlines that would allow them to hide ancillary fees for consumers as they’re searching for tickets, according to Bloomberg.
The German auto industry’s still rankled by Volkswagen’s colossal, very purposeful screwup in the form of Dieselgate, and now the nation’s automakers are scrambling to deal with allegations of running a cartel to fix prices as far back as the 1990s. The Financial Times put together a helpful explainer on the…
With lower fares and fewer problems, the airline industry has, somehow, been on an upward trend in recent years. Customer satisfaction has been up five years running, and it continued to increase between 2016 and 2017. March 2017, that is—before major airliners started going berserk on their customers.
Part of what sucks about flying is checking your bag. Aside from paying the stupid bag fee, part of what sucks about checking your bag is the very real possibility of the airline delaying or losing your bag. So, not only did you pay, but you paid for a poor service. Well, the Obama administration says that it’s time…
Good morning! Welcome to The Morning Shift, your roundup of the auto news you crave, all in one place every weekday morning. Here are the important stories you need to know.
To anyone who was worried: the American airline industry isn’t in as bad a shape as Donald Trump is making it out to be, who says that if he isn’t elected to be President, Boeing’s jobs are moving to China.
This is complete madness, but the guy as one good reason for doing it. Well, he has one good reason and a generous background of general lunacy.
Airlines lose and damage luggage all the time. But what if that luggage was your only way to get around? What if instead of misplacing a bag, the airline removed your ability to move about independently? That’s exactly what one airline did to my wife on a trip to Mexico two years ago.
I know we live in an era where companies want to get as much data out of us as possible, and normally the data they want has to do with our consuming habits. But not always. Sometimes, it seems like companies may be trying to decide if we’re replicants, like in this survey sent to United frequent flyers.
If you think about it, the way we load and unload planes with passengers (or, in airline terminology, ambulatory waste-producing cargo) is wildly inefficient. Slow, shuffling, cranky lines of people slowly filing into seats while the plane is stuck there—isn’t there a better way? Airbus thinks so, and has the patent…
I would imagine running an airline is very easy — buy some planes, fly them to popular places with better service and/or lower cost than your competitors, and make millions. This does not appear to be the case!
You may be familiar with this meme: “If a 747 can carry the space shuttle, then I call bullshit on overweight luggage fees.” Airlines collected $38.1 billion in revenue from such fees in 2014, almost a 21 percent increase year-over-year. These fees are the new normal, and future fees are a pure insult to your…
An Air France Airbus A330 that originated out of Paris had an anonymous threat against it concerning chemical weapons this morning. This, along with the fact that reports say the jet was non-responsive as controllers attempted to contact it resulted in fighter jets being scrambled to its location. The jet was escorted…
A family traveling with a high-functioning autistic daughter were kicked off a United Airlines flight from Orlando to Portland because the pilot “didn’t feel comfortable” flying with her on the plane, even though no major incident had taken place. The pilot made an emergency landing and had the family removed. Was…
SkyWest flight 5622 en route to Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks, CT experienced a rapid decompression after losing cabin pressure somewhere over Lake Erie.
After reaching a record number of pet deaths in the past five years, Delta will now let you pay them $50 to have your beloved four-legged family member tracked via GPS.
Air India hosted a job fair earlier this week in hopes of filling at least some of the 197 vacant pilot spots for its Airbus fleet, alone. Not a single applicant showed up. Not. One.
This airline passenger of questionable sanity/sobriety, on a flight from Nicaragua to Miami, goes on an epic rant then gets caught lighting up. In two separate videos, tragically shot vertically, our crazy lady is shown puffing away before stashing her still-lit smoke in the seat pocket, and then it got weird.
Airline livery is generally more design than art, but Icelandair sought to change that, commissioning artists to recreate one of the most stunning natural visuals in the world on its Boeing 757.
Flight attendants have a job that holds a lot of prestige in the eyes of most travelers, and they get called a lot of different things while doing their jobs — waitress, m'am, hey you, miss, air hostess, and trolley dolly. But one moniker that has pretty much gone out the emergency exit door is "stewardess," and…
