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.
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?
Paris Charles de Gaulle, Moscow Sheremetyevo, and London Heathrow are the worlds worst airports, according to the current survey at sleepinginairports.com. In the annual air traveller’s report of the Business Week Magazine, the Prague Franz Kafka International Airport has now been announced to be the World’s Most Alienating Airport. This is reported by the Onion News Network, maybe a critical additional information here.
The Franz Kafka International annoys travellers with 32.2 hours average flight delay, extremely long corridors leading to dead ends, and an unusually extensive security interview in which the honesty and identity of travellers is thoroughly tested. Furthermore, travellers complain about “everyone keeps calling me S.”. In a statement, airport officials dismiss the criticism. See the full story here:
Domestic passengers got the shock of their lives this week as bikies brazenly attacked a rival gang at an arrivals area.
More than 50 passengers arriving in Sydney on Sunday afternoon witnessed the brawl as the Hells Angels and Comanchero gangs traded fists. One man was hit repeatedly over the head with a metal bollard. Such was the speed of the violence that police and security forces were powerless to stop the melee.
One gang member was killed in the fight. Detectives say it was a carefully planned ambush on the rival gang, who were arriving from Adelaide, and had come to Sydney as reinforcements in a current gang stoush.
Four men were arrested shortly after the attack. And with security CCTV cameras capturing it from every angle, police are confident of rounding up the others involved. It’s believed this is the first such brawl ever witnessed in Sydney Airport.
If you are planning to smuggle some drugs through the airport next time you travel, add this to the tactics you probably shouldn’t try.
Apparently a 66-year-old passenger who arrived at Barcelona airport in a wheelchair with a leg cast made entirely of cocaine was arrested on Friday as he tried to get through customs.
The man, flying from Santiago, Chile, also had cocaine stashed in six cans of beer and two folding stools in his luggage, the Interior Ministry said. Police confiscated nearly 5 kilograms (11 pounds) of the drug in total.
Police believe the man, or his accomplices, may have broken the leg on purpose so as not to arouse the suspicions of customs officials. Damn, you have to applaud the guy for trying anyways. Remember he is 66 years old after all.
Has April Fools day come a month early this year, because this has to be a joke!?!?!?
Irish carrier Ryanair, Europe’s largest budget airline, might start charging passengers for using the toilet while flying.
In an interview for the BBC, Ryanair Chief executive Michael O’Leary is quoted as saying “One thing we have looked at in the past and are looking at again is the possibility of maybe putting a coin slot on the toilet door so that people might actually have to spend a pound to spend a penny in future.”
He said this would not inconvenience passengers travelling without cash. “I don’t think there is anybody in history that has got on board a Ryanair aircraft with less than a pound.”
Before you add “toilet coin” to your packing list, a spokesman for the airline said in a statement “Michael makes a lot of this stuff up as he goes along and while this has been discussed internally there are no immediate plans to introduce it.”
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