This is interesting.

I think, like Ninja said, that he sould have either told someone that he was going back to the back of the plane to pray, or waited until they were in the air. Also, like Ninja said, people shouldn't have to wait for you to finish praying so the plane can take off.

The other point, is that I think the customer service agent and the 3 flight attendants blew it a 'tad bit out of proportion. He should not have been booted from the flight for saying a 2 1/2 minute prayer. Honestly, if you count the number of times that flights are delayed due to the officials of the airline (American Airlines), it shouldn't be a problem for a 1 passenger to delay '1' plane.

But the point is, none of this would have ever happened if the Orthodox man would have waited until they were in the air to pray. Not that hard, and as Ninja said, there doesn't appear to be a 'certain time' that these men have to pray these prayers.

There is no time of day that this has to be done, unlike Islam. Ive seen these guys do this many times on flights in and out of NY and for people from other states seeing these men pray and put the towels on their heads when doing it, most peoplefeel that they are muslims and get rather upset. Ive been on a few fligts were people have asked the stewardess what they are doing. They often do it right in the middle of the dahm flight and wont move out of the way either if anyone wants to gets by.

Well, in my opinion, that is a tad bit rude. If someone needs to get by, they need to get by. Do they have the right to just stand or sit in a random spot, whether it be an airliner or not, and pray? For example, if I needed to use the restroom on an airplane and someone wouldn't move because they were praying, I would be a little mad.

FLIGHT FRIGHTS ON RISE
NEAR-COLLISIONS AT JFK & NEWARK
By BILL SANDERSON

April 21, 2008 --

Taxiways and runways are getting more dangerous at Kennedy and Newark airports, with reports of near-collisions and other incidents up sharply since October, The Post has learned.

Four incidents have been counted at Newark Airport since the 2008 federal fiscal year began Oct. 1 - already equaling the number reported in all of 2007, according to Federal Aviation Administration data obtained by The Post.

http://www.nypost.com/seven/04212008/photos/new015a.jpg
LOOK OUT BELOW! Airlines line up for takeoff
at Newark Airport, where four "runway incidents"
have been reported since October.

The scariest was Dec. 6, when a Continental Boeing 737 arriving from Toronto missed hitting a commuter jet that taxied across its runway about 400 feet below.

Two runway incidents have been counted at Kennedy since Oct. 1, compared with three incidents in all of 2007.

In a frightening Kennedy incident Jan. 3, a Boeing 767 had to abort its takeoff when an Airbus A320 crossed onto the opposite end of its runway without permission. The planes were more than a mile apart.

No runway incidents have been reported at La Guardia so far this year, helping push down the overall total for the three main passenger airports to six since Oct. 1, on track with the previous year.

The number of incidents is also down at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, which mostly serves private planes and executive jets.

FAA officials say their adoption of a stricter definition of runway incidents in October may be a factor in the Newark and Kennedy increases. Under the new definition, an incident is "any occurrence . . . involving the incorrect presence of an aircraft, vehicle or person" where planes land or take off.

Ray Adams, vice president of the air-controllers union local at Newark, says a high number of trainee controllers is also a worry.

"We are used to training people who have air-traffic experience," Adams said. "But now we have got kids coming off the street who have never worked an airplane in their life, know nothing about aviation, and we are trying to teach them from scratch."

Increased traffic at the airports is also a worry, said Barrett Byrnes, a controllers-union official at Kennedy, where the number of takeoffs and landings has grown from 291,000 in 2002 to 453,000 last year.

"When you are busy, there's no room for error," Byrnes said. "The wheels are spinning too fast - that's the reason all this stuff is happening."

FAA officials say they've taken a number of steps to improve runway and taxiway safety in recent months - including improvements to pavement markings and signs. The agency also plans to deploy better ground control radar and surveillance systems at Kennedy, La Guardia and Newark.

Copyright 2008 New York Post

This is why the idiots who take off their seat belts and try to stand up after the flight lands get yelled at. Taxying (taxiing? taxi-ing?) is the most dangerous part of the flight.

Exactly! People who have been on flights before should know that when you land, you are to stay seated with your seat belts fastened until the plane has come to the gate and completely stopped. In fact, I think I may have just said what the attendants actually say. http://www.discussworldissues.com/fo...es/redface.png

When we landed at La Guardia, I was sitting at the very front of the airplane and one woman ran to the front to be the first one off. I was like, "Are you kidding me?" The plane isn't going anywhere!

Some people.... http://www.discussworldissues.com/fo...s/confused.png

Great.

Reading this really helps with my phobia of flying.

Out of curiosity, how good are United airlines? I'll be using them a few times in June.

I read through a few reviews on ReviewCentre.com, and it seems like a pretty good airliner. If I remember right, the whole "cancelling-of-flights" ordeal started with American Airlines and then United followed for a little while (I may be wrong), but you should be fine and won't have your flights delayed for days. http://www.discussworldissues.com/fo...ilies/wink.png

The only downside to United Airlines that I see at this point is THIS which, like a lot of other customers, makes me a little mad. http://www.discussworldissues.com/fo...lies/smile.png

Hope this helps,
Ben

Meer, dont get too panicky.

Take a look at how many there actually were (if anyone has that data) and see that sometimes when they say "up sharply", it is only in comparison to what it was.

1 collision a year going to 2 would be a "100% increase".

I am not thrilled with the news either, but the rate of collisions would be another thing to take into consideration. How many collide in 1000 flights? They said the reason for the collisions was due to an increas in the amount of flights, so....

I think the ratio might have gone up a bit, but if you do not scare people with a headline nowadays, they will not read your article!!!

The charge for 2 items of luggage seems a bit unfair. I'll have a suitcase and a rucksack - i assume then i will be charged for both?

I don't think so. I think it only means about packages or luggage that you are checking to go underneath the plane. I would hope that carry-ons would not be charged for! They haven't in the past and I sure hope they don't start now...

http://www.discussworldissues.com/fo...lies/smile.png

That's OK then. I've already paid for the flights, i don't want another charge for my bags when i get to the check in.

One thing i've noticed is how inexpensive flying in the US is. Just under $50 to fly from LA to San Francisco - much less than flying in Europe.

If anyone else reading this is scared of flying i found this book very helpful.

For Airlines, Runways Are the Danger Zone
By MATTHEW L. WALD
Published: April 25, 2008

WASHINGTON — The recent groundings of thousands of flights have raised flags about skipped airplane inspections and botched repairs to wiring.
But what really worries aviation specialists? Runway collisions.

“Where we are most vulnerable at this moment is on the ground,” the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, Mark V. Rosenker, said. “To me, this is the most dangerous aspect of flying.”

For the six-month period that ended March 30, there were 15 serious “runway incursions,” compared with 8 in the period a year earlier. Another occurred at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport on April 6 when a tug operator pulling a Boeing 777 along a taxiway failed to stop at a runway as another plane was landing, missing the tug by about 25 feet.

The last airliner crash in the United States, a regional jet in Lexington, Ky., in August 2006, was a runway incursion because the crew tried to take off on the wrong runway.

The problem — defined broadly as the unauthorized presence of a plane, vehicle or pedestrian on a runway — continues despite efforts by the Federal Aviation Administration and airports to improve lighting and signs on the ground, to train pilots and to identify intersections that are particularly problematic.

Everyone agrees the number of incursions is too large.

Runway collisions are caused almost entirely by human error. But they are still mostly preventable, because the risk could be substantially reduced with existing technology, ranging from paint on the pavement to electronic warning systems.

Some of the more sophisticated electronic systems are commercially available, but are not required by the F.A.A. And the most recent decision by the agency about a new generation of equipment for navigation and surveillance appears to delay the widespread adoption of in-cockpit warning technology by at least more than a decade.

Solving the runway incursion problem has been on the National Transportation Safety Board’s “most wanted list” of safety improvements since the list was created in 1990, and the board rates the F.A.A.’s response as “unacceptable.”

The board recommended in 2000 that the F.A.A. require a collision warning system that would alert crews directly, rather than alerting tower controllers, but the F.A.A. has said that the complexity and expense are too great.

It has, however, committed to installing more runway status lights, which warn pilots at intersections when a runway is in use. The board also recommended requiring tower controllers to clear planes for each runway crossing, rather than simply clearing a plane to proceed from a gate to a runway end. But the F.A.A. has not agreed to that change.

Runway safety has loomed larger as a problem partly because other issues have been resolved. For example, in the last decade, all jet airliners have been equipped with systems that make it much harder to accidentally fly into a mountain or collide with another plane. Fire extinguishers and smoke detectors have been put in cargo compartments, and insulation that could feed an in-flight fire has been replaced.

But the technology gap that remains between the air and the ground is striking.

“You can fly an aircraft across the Pacific or across the Atlantic, and at any point in that journey you know where you are within about three meters, until you get on the ground,” said Randy Babbitt, a longtime airline pilot and former president of the Air Line Pilots Association.

In the air, big airliners have navigation systems based on Global Positioning System satellites, that locate them in the air, but these are not generally linked to surface maps, which would locate them by taxiway and runway.

So an approaching plane can find a runway end in near-zero visibility, but can then get lost once on the surface.

“If you’ve got a G.P.S. in your car, you have infinitely more detailed information about where you are than in the cockpit of an airplane on the ground at Kennedy,” Mr. Babbitt said.

The most deadly aviation accident ever was the collision in March 1977 of two Boeing 747’s, on a foggy runway in Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, killing 583 people.

The F.A.A. recognizes the problem.

At the height of the American Airlines flight cancellations, on April 10, the associate administrator for safety, Nicholas A. Sabatini, was testifying before a Senate aviation subcommittee about his agency’s safety work, and while the senators wanted to hear about lapses in inspections, almost half his testimony was about runway safety.

“The F.A.A. is committed to designing an end-to-end system that seeks to eliminate runway incursions while accommodating human error,” he said.

“We all have a role in the solution,” he said, mentioning airlines, airports, and unions representing pilots and air traffic controllers.

The agency has accelerated a program to make airports paint more conspicuous marks on the pavement, he said, to identify “hold short” lines (like the white line on the street next to a stop sign) and other important markings.

It has announced a plan to embed traffic lights into the pavement, to stop planes from blundering into intersections. And it is expanding use of a system that gives controllers a better view of traffic on the ground, on a radarlike screen that may take data from several sources.

But the inspector general of the Transportation Department testified at the same hearing that the program was likely to be late and over budget.

One product that is commercially available gives warnings of many errors.

Honeywell Aerospace makes a runway-awareness and advisory system that combines a G.P.S. receiver with a database of runways and taxiways.

In a demonstration in February at Washington Dulles International Airport, a test pilot, Anson Gray, showed how it was impossible to inadvertently take off from a taxiway, a surprisingly frequent error. He pushed his twin-engine business jet up to 40 knots, and an urgent mechanical voice warned: “On Taxiway! On Taxiway! On Taxiway!”

Then Mr. Gray entered a runway only 900 feet from the end, pivoted toward that end and began to taxi as if for takeoff. “Nine hundred feet remaining!” it squawked.

When that plane, a Sabre 65, descends below 500 feet with the landing gear down, if the system does not sense a runway within half a mile, it tells the crew to pull up. If there is a runway, it announces the runway number, eliminating another potential error.

The Honeywell system does not see other airplanes, a major drawback. Another is the list price: $17,000. The manufacturer said the system would have provided a warning to the pilots in Lexington, Ky., who took off on the wrong runway on Aug. 27, 2006, and smashed into a berm, killing 49 people.

A more capable system, one that gives each cockpit a screen that shows the plane’s own position and the position, equipment type and relative speed of every other plane in the neighborhood, has been demonstrated repeatedly by the Cargo Airline Association.

In that system, the plane automatically broadcasts its location, determined by G.P.S., and its identity. The broadcast is picked up on the ground but also on other airplanes.

The F.A.A. is encouraging the system, and demonstrated it in an airplane the agency owns. But it will not work for safety purposes until all planes are equipped. The agency recently proposed requiring all planes to broadcast for the system, but not until 2020. It set no requirement for planes to have receivers.

The F.A.A. is under pressure not to add to the expenses of the airlines, and it must justify each proposed change. Mr. Rosenker of the Safety Board complained that the F.A.A. gave no safety value to the system — although it would have other benefits, like untangling air traffic.

“One accident that saves a passenger aircraft or two, and the cost-benefit analysis will have been well served by the implementation,” he said.

Safety investigators, meanwhile, are looking at an event at Dallas-Fort Worth just before noon on April 6. A mechanic towing an empty Boeing 777 from an American Airlines maintenance hangar on the west side of the airport back to a gate to the east was told to hold short of Runway 18 right. The tug operator acknowledged the instruction, according to an official of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the union, but was moving so fast that the tower controller radioed a second time.

When the tug operator came back on the radio, he told the tower controller, “I’m trying,” according to the union official, Ric Loewen.

The tug operator swerved to avoid towing the plane to the middle of the runway, and the tug’s rear wheels jumped off the ground, the F.A.A. said.
Safety officials say they are looking into the possibility of brake failure, or of the tug operator’s simply misjudging the momentum of the plane behind him.

The big danger, though, was that another American Airlines plane, an MD-80, had touched down about 3,000 feet up Runway 12. In clear conditions, the pilot saw the tug and the big plane behind it approaching from the left, and pointed his plane toward the right edge of the runway. He missed the tug by about 25 feet, according to initial reports.

Copyright 2008 New York Times Company

I do not understand why the government still requires the demonstration on how to fasten your seat belt?

For the six-month period that ended March 30, there were 15 serious “runway incursions,” Up from 8? On how many flights?

I don't think that this is something to ignore,but if 15 things happened, in 6 months, that this is a VERY RARE event.

It should not happen, but spending this much time and resource on it may not be warranted. Also, this much coverage over a relatively minor event. I still do not see where planes are falling from skies and thousands are being killed a year.......

I'm sure on just about all flights there are those people who have never ridden on a plane before and need that instruction.

^^ ... or never rode in a car ... ? http://www.discussworldissues.com/fo...ilies/wink.png

Yes, or that. http://www.discussworldissues.com/fo...ies/tongue.png

Not necessarily related to airline safety, but refers to an article also posted in this thread by me that topics charging of bags:

---

AMERICAN AIRLINES TO CHARGE $15 FOR FIRST CHECKED BAG

ASSOCIATED PRESS

May 21, 2008 --

FORT WORTH, Texas -- American Airlines will start charging $15 for the first checked bag, cut domestic flights and lay off possibly thousands of workers as it grapples with record-high fuel prices.

Rival Delta has no current plans to match American's fee for the first checked bag, a spokeswoman said.

American, the nation's largest carrier, said Wednesday the fee for the first checked bag starts June 15 and that it would raise other fees for services ranging from reservation help to oversized bags. The other fees will mostly range from $5 to $50 per service, the airline said.

http://www.nypost.com/seven/05212008...s/american.jpg
A passenger stands at the American Airlines desk.

Last month American announced it would join other carriers in charging $25 for second bags checked for some passengers, but it wasn't immediately clear how Wednesday's announcement would affect that.

Its proposed fee for a first checked bag would exempt people who belong to elite levels of its frequent flyer programs, those who bought full-fare tickets and those traveling overseas.

Delta Air Lines Inc. spokeswoman Betsy Talton said the Atlanta-based airline is considering all of its options in light of $130-a-barrel oil, but has no plans "at this time" to match the $15 fee American announced.

Chairman and Chief Executive Gerard J. Arpey said he expects the new or raised fees will raise several hundred million dollars, but that was the best estimate he would give.

The changes were being made to adapt to "the current reality of slow economic growth and high oil prices," Arpey said. He said the fees are an effort to get customers to pay for services they want.

Arpey didn't put a figure on the layoffs, but when asked whether he expected the figure to be in the thousands he said yes.

American plans to cut domestic flight capacity by 11 percent to 12 percent in the fourth quarter. American had previously expected fourth-quarter capacity to fall 4.6 percent from the same period in 2007.

Parent AMR Corp. said reduced flying will lead to an undisclosed number of job cuts at both American and its American Eagle subsidiary.

AMR expects to retire 45 to 50 planes from its fleet, most of them gas-guzzling MD-80 aircraft. Those were the plane grounded for faulty wiring last month.

American said rising oil prices have increased its expected annual fuel costs by nearly $3 billion since the start of the year.

AMR shares tumbled $1.42, or 17.2 percent, to $6.78 after the announcement which came as its shareholders gathered for their annual meeting. They sank to a 52-week low of $6.72 earlier in the session.

Copyright 2008 NYPost.com

BS Nickel and diming.

They should not charge for every little thing seperately unless they offer a special "ala carte" pricing schedule.

Maybe "coach" should be one step up from the airline equivalent of the train through India. You get peanuts, a soda, one check in bag and two SMALL carry-ons. But if you want the $50 special from NYC to Boston, you sit next to the bathroom, no drinks w/o paying, no bags of nuts and only one carry-on.

Whatever. This stuff is only going to make less people use them, which is exactly what they do not need.