Sleeping in Airports blog

An Arizona couple has been caught with over a thousand pieces of luggage stolen from the carousels of the Phoenix airport.  Kevin King and Stacy Legg-King are accused of walking into the baggage claim area and brazenly taking a random bag before walking straight out to their parked car.  As there are no claim check security measures at the airport, they were able to get away with this over a thousand times.  Some of the stolen items include: cameras, laptops, video equipment, clothing, medical devices, video games, baseball card and stamp collections and passports.  Passports???  The people who packed their passports in their checked luggage deserved to have it stolen.

Apparently, the couple often held yard sales and their neighbours scored some great deals.

Inspired by people who are forced to wait at airports and train stations during their trip, this clever 4-piece suitcase set can be pieced together to build a two-seater couch.

Twenty-two year old Dutch designer Erik de Nijs (the guy who brought us the keyboard pants), revealed his “Suited Case” project at Dutch Design Week 09 last month.  He says “this concept came from a research on nostalgia during travelling. When a familiar object from home is taken with you on a trip you feel much more at ease. And which object is more familiar then your own comfortable couch.”  Brilliant idea with a few practical looking pieces for a nice airport nap.  Shame about the fabrics!

photo uploaded by publik16.

It’s probably no secret to you that the body scanners are coming to an airport near you…..

After trial runs at several airports such as Amsterdam, Moscow, Manchester, New York City and Kelowna, more airports are installing the controversial scanners that can see through your clothes.

The machines, which produce a three-dimensional outline of a person’s naked body, would only be used when a secondary screening in required.  According to Canada’s Privacy Commissioner, the individual viewing the scan would not see the person’s face in the line-up and there are safeguards to delete the image immediately after the person leaves the portal.

But a sense of invasion still exists and to alleviate this concern, people singled out for this extra screening would have the choice of the full-body scan or the pat down.

As someone who has a metal plate and 16 pins in her leg (from a car accident), I ALWAYS get pulled over for the secondary screening.  For me this is not a case of “if” I have to do a secondary screen, it is “when” I have to do the secondary screen. The pat downs are embarrassing, but am I looking forward to being xrayed instead?  No!

Having said that, new things can be scary.  With time and evidence that some pervy security guy is not sitting in a room with his cell phone taking photos of the scans and posting them on his Twitter account, maybe then I will choose the scans over the pat downs.

What about you?  What are your thoughts on the Body Scans vs Pat Downs issue?

Airport homeless, originally uploaded by TempletonElliott.

….and no, it wasn’t me!

Thanks to Charles for passing along this story!

A woman who police believe was homeless was asked to leave Toronto’s Pearson International Airport after living there for a month.

The unidentified woman who had been hauling around a pink suitcase in Terminal 1 since mid-April did not appear to have any mental issues. Since she “met the threshold for trespassing”, police gave her bus fare and she left without a struggle.

Trish Krale, a spokeswoman for the Greater Toronto Airports Authority told CTV News “It’s not unheard of to get reports of people sleeping in the airport for extended periods of time”.

“It’s a rare occurrence but it does happen from time to time,” she said.

And because the airport never closes, it’s not unusual for people to be seen walking around — or catching a quick nap — overnight.

The number of cases in which the homeless around the world are seeking shelter in airports seems to be on the rise. Last summer, the Daily Mail wrote an article about people living in the Heathrow Airport. There have also been publicized cases of people seeking refuge in the Palma and Mexico City airports. Paris Charles de Gaulle is well known for the number of homeless people wandering around at all hours including one man who famously lived there for 12 years and was the inspiration for the movie “Terminal” starring Tom Hanks.  CDG’s relaxed policy on dealing with the homeless seems to have only helped it become a miserable airport for travellers.

So what do you think of this trend?  Should sleeping in airports be limited to cheap or stranded travellers or the homeless if they behave themselves and don’t stink up the place? At what point should airport officials say “GET OUT!!!” to all of us?

A passenger landed a twin-engine plane in Florida after the pilot died in flight with a total of six people on board.

Federal Aviation Administration officials say the pilot died after takeoff from an airport in Naples on Sunday. It was on autopilot and climbing toward 10,000 feet when the pilot died.

Thankfully, the passenger who landed the plane is licensed for single-engine planes and had some knowledge of aircraft, but he was not certified to fly the larger King Air craft.

The air traffic controller helped the passenger down by calling a friend who knows the King Air plane and relaying instructions. The plane landed safely at Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers.

A planeful of passengers must have quite an experience this week when their pilot accidentally landed at a military airport in Tbilisi, Georgia.

The Turkish Airlines plane, which had departed from Istanbul, missed its target airport by around 17km and somehow ended up landing at the wrong airport, with 69 people on board.

An anonymous aviation official from Istanbul has confirmed the incident, but Turkish Airlines have nothing to say on the matter.

What I find most perplexing is, the plane undoubtedly had enough fuel to make the extra 17km to the passenger airport, and surely Air Traffic Control and Ground Control in the area must have noticed the plane going off-course? How did nobody alert the pilot?

After all, planes don’t generally land without being given permission… and it’s difficult to believe that a military airport would happily welcome a foreign passenger plane that it wasn’t expecting.

Strange things are afoot!

In a move certain to polarise passengers, an airport in the UK has introduced a pay service - with a twist.

Forget buying your in-flight meal, selling your firstborn to park the car, or swiping the VISA to use the toilet - Luton London has out-done them all. Customers waiting in long queues for security screening can now pay a £5 fee to push into the front of the line.

Luton spokespeople claim it’s simply an optional premium service, akin to valet parking and executive lounges. But others disagree. As easyJet staff point out, customers should already be able to expect a reasonable amount of security, and there are murmurs that hustling the elite through quickly might compromise that.

And the whole issue is worse for the hip pocket, since it’s now in the airport’s financial interest to slow down the “non pay” lines as much as possible, in order to entice stressed travellers into the pay queue, desperate to get to their plane on time. In other words, the worse the airport’s service, the more they earn.

What do you think - would you pay for the queue-jumping, or do you stand your ground and say it’s wrong?

Photo: Grant Turner / Sydney Morning Herald