A worker at the Montgomery Regional Airport in Alabama died Saturday in an incident on the ramp, the Federal Aviation Administration said Saturday.
The Montgomery Regional Airport said in a statement an American Airlines/Piedmont Airlines ground crew employee was “involved in a fatality” around 3 p.m.
“We are saddened to hear about the tragic loss of a team member of the AA/Piedmont Airlines,” said Wade A. Davis, the airport’s executive director. “Our thoughts and prayers are with the family during this difficult time.”
American Airlines said in a statement it was “devastated by the accident involving a team member,” adding, “Our thoughts and prayers are with the family and our local team members. We are focused on ensuring that all involved have the support they need during this difficult time.”
All inbound and outbound flights were grounded for more than four hours Saturday afternoon, but the airport said it returned to normal operations as of 8:30 p.m.
The victim was not named, and the circumstances of the death were not immediately released. The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board will both investigate.
The flight, operated by regional carrier Envoy Air, was scheduled to depart Montgomery for Dallas-Fort Worth Saturday afternoon, according to the flight tracking site FlightAware.com.
CNN reached out to Envoy Air for further information Saturday.
Flying overseas in business-class or better is one of those things — like getting the Good Seats at the game — that, once you’ve done it, it’s hard to go back to coach or the bleachers. Some luxuries, you will convince yourself, are worth paying for. According to The Wall Street Journal, one such option — first-class seats on international American Airlines flights — is soon going away. American says this decision was made, in part, to add more business-class seats, which these days, are more or less what the old first-class was anyway.
American had previously said as much last month, though WSJ reports that on an earnings call on Thursday, an American executive said plainly that the airline is making the change for the simple reason that first-class isn’t selling as well as the other good seats on the plane.
“And frankly, by removing [first-class seats], we can provide more business-class seats, which is what our customers most want or are most willing to pay for,” [said Chief Commercial Officer Vasu Raj.]
[…]
…the airline will outfit its long-haul fleet with new “Flagship Suites,” which include seats that lie flat and sliding doors for privacy, in a revamp that will increase premium seating on those planes by more than 45% by 2026.
The new suites will be included on newly delivered Boeing 787-9 planes and Airbus A321 XLRs starting in 2024. American will also retrofit its Boeing 777-300ER planes to include the new suites.
The sliding door thing seems a little unnecessary, but then again people get real weird on planes, especially on long-haul trips, and some people value their privacy more than I do. More importantly, this says that many of the business-class seats lie flat, which is the real game-changer, as deplaning overseas after hours of fitful, garbage sleep in an upright chair as opposed to restful, continuous sleep lying flat makes a night-and-day difference.
This seems, in any case, mostly an exercise in branding, as “first-class” just sounds more expensive than “business-class,” which, as the WSJ notes, has most of the same benefits anyway. Is either of them worth it for you, a poor dirtbag? That is a personal decision, though I prefer to save my nickels for my destination, and arrive in London or wherever stiff as a board, having flown coach. The times I have flown first- or business-class were paid for by someone else, which was nice of them. On one such flight, I even sat next to the actress Rooney Mara once. I’m sure she was doing something a lot cooler in France than driving a dumb luxury SUV.
Bad news if you need to travel to one of America’s smaller airports. Insider reports regional airline company Aha! has declared bankruptcy and shut down. The move comes less than a year after the airline launched, and just over a month after it was called the “fastest growing regional airline in the western US.”
Aha! was born of the pandemic. After ExpressJet, one of the oldest regional airlines in the country, filed for bankruptcy in the fall of 2020, Aha! was founded out of its ashes just over a year later.
Using small, 50-seat Embraer planes, the airline connected smaller regional airports in the western US for point-to-point travel. If you needed to get somewhere like Bakersfield (god only knows why someone would need to fly into Bakersfield) or Eugene, Oregon, Aha! was your airline.
But ongoing global issues rang the death knell for the company. In a prepared statement, CEO Subodh Karnik said a “combination of conditions” led to the airline filing for bankruptcy and ceasing operations immediately. Among them: rising fuel costs, a lack of aircraft availability and a pilot shortage. “Despite the valiant efforts of our employees to overcome challenges, and despite great support by our cities and airports – especially Reno-Tahoe and the community there, we arrived at a point where termination of operations was in the best interest of our stakeholders,” Karnik said in a statement.
Insider points out that smaller regional airlines have been hit hard by the pandemic. A lack of demand has driven down profits and caused many small operators to close up shop.
In February, Frontier Airlines announced a planned $2.9 billion acquisition of Spirit Airlines. JetBlue Airways revealed its rival $3.6 billion all-cash bid in early April, sparking a bidding war for Spirit between the two carriers that has continued ever since. Either potential merged airline combination would become the fifth-largest in the United States. Though, it seems the war is finally coming to an end with Frontier and Spirit reaching agreeable terms.
The biggest roadblock to Frontier’s acquisition of Spirit Airlines wasn’t any offer proposed by JetBlue but Spirit’s own shareholders. At the start of June, Institutional Shareholder Services, a proxy advisory company, implored shareholders not to vote for the Frontier deal. Spirit then delayed the vote on the acquisition until June 30th. The management of the Florida-based airline stated that it delayed the vote because of the lack of shareholder support but continued seeking a better deal with Frontier as its first option.
Today, Institutional Shareholder Services has reversed its stance and recommended a vote for a new deal with Frontier Airlines. ISS stated, “Shareholders are best served by taking the deal that provides the best combination of long-term value and compensation in the event of regulatory rejection. On balance, support for the merger with Frontier on the revised terms is warranted.” Frontier raised his purchase bid by $2 per share ($4.13 per share), matching an increase from JetBlue. Frontier also raised its reverse termination fee to Spirit to $350 million, an $100 million increase.
JetBlue’s current $3.7 billion offer might sound enticing, but the New York-based airline has done little to ease Spirit’s worries that government regulators won’t actually approve the deal. JetBlue is currently under anti-trust investigation for its strategic alliance with American Airlines. When asked by Spirit to end the controversial partnership to further negotiations, JetBlue declined. This rebuffed demand somewhat indicated that JetBlue simply wanted to disrupt the creation of a direct industry rival.
Photo: John Lamparski/SOPA Images/LightRocket (Getty Images)
The Federal Aviation Administration on Friday published a list of the 50 U.S. airports that will have buffer zones, or areas where AT&T and Verizon have agreed to limit 5G signals for six months.
In a statement, the FAA said it worked with the aviation community to determine where the buffer zones would reduce the risk of disruptions, considering factors such as traffic volume, the number of low-visibility days, and geographic location. The agency said that many airports are not currently affected by AT&T and Verizon’s upcoming 5G deployment, a service the wireless companies will activate on Jan. 19 after various delays.
The buffer zones aim to reduce the potential interference of 5G antennas with airplane instruments, called radar altimeters, that tell pilots how far they are from the ground. They help pilots navigate and land planes during bad weather and prevent crashes.
Airports on the list include Dallas Love Field, a major passenger hub for Southwest Airlines, and Chicago O’Hare, which is a large hub for United Airlines and American Airlines. Facilities that serve as hubs for cargo and private jets, such as airports in Indianapolis, Northern New Jersey, and New York City, were also part of those selected.
In addition, the list includes airports in Austin, Nashville, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Seattle, and San Francisco, among many others.
The FAA’s announcement comes amid a temporary ceasefire between transportation regulators and aviation groups, who worry that 5G antennas near some airports could affect the accuracy of altimeters’ readings, and telecommunications regulators and wireless companies, who maintain that 5G technology will not pose safety issues.
On Monday, AT&T and Verizon agreed to pause their 5G rollout for two additional weeks at the request of federal agencies. The move was a rapid about-face from the wireless companies, which just a day earlier had fervently put their foot down and said that agreeing to the petition would have been “an irresponsible abdication of the operating control required to deploy world-class and globally competitive communications networks.”
AT&T and Verizon bought nearly all of the C-band radio spectrum auctioned by the Federal Communications Commission last year, spending a combined total of nearly $70 billion, to improve their 5G networks.
Over the next six months, which is how long AT&T and Verizon have agreed to keep the buffers in place around the 50 airports, the FAA will work with aerospace manufacturers and airlines to confirm whether planes can safely operate after the wireless companies’ 5G service is turned on.
As if we needed any more problems, passengers from hell are a thing now (or more a thing than before, anyway). They assault flight attendants, toss food and alcohol around, and throw their masks on the ground. Delta Air Lines has apparently had enough.
In two internal memos to employees this week, Delta said it had asked its competitors to share their internal no-fly lists, which it says would prevent crappy passengers from causing trouble on different airlines. The company has so far submitted more than 600 names of banned passengers to the Federal Aviation Administration this year.
The memos were sent on the same week that Delta participated, through the industry trade group Airlines for America, in a hearing on “air rage” held by the House Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure on Thursday.
Kristen Manion Taylor, senior vice president of inflight service, said in her memo that Delta had more than 1,600 people on its internal no-fly list. She added that the company had been analyzing safety on its flights over the past few months and would roll out additional measures on training and response on board.
“We’ve also asked other airlines to share their ‘no fly’ list to further protect airline employees across the industry – something we know is top of mind for you as well,” Taylor said. “A list of banned customers doesn’t work as well if that customer can fly with another airline.”
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It’s not clear how such information-sharing would work, though. When asked by the Washington Post, Delta did not elaborate whether sharing the internal lists should be done via the federal government or directly with other airlines.
According to the FAA, the majority of the problems with unruly passengers this year are related to individuals refusing to comply with federal mask mandates. Since January, the agency has received about 3,889 reports of unruly passengers. Of those, 2,867 involved the mask mandate. As of August, the FAA had fined these passengers more than $1 million in fines for their bad behavior.
At the hearing, Lauren Beyer, the vice president for security and facilitation at Airlines for America, said that “there are legal and operational challenges with airlines sharing those lists amongst one another,” the Post reported.
In response, committee chairman Peter DeFazio, Democrat of Oregon, mulled whether it would be possible for the FAA to create a database with the information from the airlines’ no-fly lists that all companies could access. Nonetheless, the FAA did not commit to the idea on Friday, telling the Post that it was meeting with airports, airlines, unions, and others to discuss what measures it could take to address unruly passengers.
SITA, a large data firm that works with some of the world’s largest airlines, announced Thursday that it had been the victim of a “highly sophisticated cyberattack,” the likes of which compromised information on hundreds of thousands of airline passengers all over the world.
The attack, which occurred in February, targeted data stored on SITA’s Passenger Service System servers, which are responsible for storing information related to transactions between carriers and customers. One of the things SITA does is act as a mechanism for data exchange between different airlines—helping to ensure that passenger “benefits can be used across different carriers” in a systematized fashion.
Understanding what specific data the hackers accessed is, at this point, a little tough—though it would appear that some of it was frequent flier information shared with SITA by members of the Star Alliance, the world’s largest global airline alliance.
An airline alliance is basically an industry consortium, and Star’s membership is comprised of some of the world’s most prominent airlines—including United Airlines, Lufthansa, Air Canada, and 23 others. Of those members, a number have already stepped forward to announce breaches in connection with the attack—and SITA itself would appear to have acknowledged that the affected parties are connected to alliance memberships.
One Alliance member, Air New Zealand, recently wrote to customers that “some of our customers’ data as well as that of many other Star Alliance airlines” had been affected by the SITA attack. Similarly, Singapore Airlines recently told its customers that some of its data had been affected by the breach because “Star Alliance member airlines provide a restricted set of frequent flyer programme [sic] data to the alliance, which is then sent on to other member airlines to reside in their respective passenger service systems.”
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It’s unclear whether all of the Star Alliance members have been affected. A SITA representative told TechCrunch that the breach “affects various airlines around the world, not just in the United States,” but declined to name all of them. We have reached out to SITA for comment and will update if they reply.
So far, it would appear that the nature of the breach is more wide than deep. That is, a lot of people seem to have been affected, though in most cases the data that was being shared with SITA does not seem that extensive. In the case of Singapore Airlines, for instance, upwards of 500,000 people had their data compromised, though the data did not include things like member itineraries, passwords, or credit card information. The airline has stated:
Around 580,000 KrisFlyer and PPS members have been affected by the breach of the SITA PSS servers. The information involved is limited to the membership number and tier status and, in some cases, membership name, as this is the full extent of the frequent flyer data that Singapore Airlines shares with other Star Alliance member airlines for this data transfer.
So…having a hacker know how often you fly doesn’t really seem that bad, right? However, even if the SITA breach isn’t that extensive, it’s yet another great example of what kind of problem third parties pose for organizations within a supply chain—and what an appealing target they make for hackers. Because of the convoluted ways in which personal data is collected, stored, and shared, it’s incredibly easy for security officials to miss the weakest link in an industry’s chain. On the other hand, it can be incredibly easy for a hacker to spot one.