Aviation Report

Memo to the lady with the hot pink luggage tag: The six cans of Libby’s pumpkin pie filling that you carefully knotted in that plastic supermarket bag for your flight to Australia are not going to explode. And to the Boise, Idaho-bound photographer with the double-locked “Golf Guard” case packed with tripods, you couldn’t have squeezed a bomb or much of anything else in there if you tried. By now you both know that your bags seemed suspicious enough to be tested for explosives by inspectors for the Transportation Security Administration before you flew Delta Airlines out of Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport recently. The TSA leaves a calling card inside every bag it opens. Which isn’t many, and that’s a good thing, given that about 14 million checked bags will pass through TSA hands nationwide during the extended Thanksgiving holiday weekend, when an estimated 24.6 million people plan to fly. Many will feel a palpable tremor of trepidation as they crowd aro...

‘Tis the season for airplane travel. We may be looking forward to getting where we’re going, but most aspects of the travel itself are merely endured. There’s stressful security, the madding crowd and the scrum at boarding, where people and their myriad belongings clog the gate area, standing between you and your departure. But take heart: There are scientifically proven ways to improve the boarding process, or at least speed it up so that it can be over and done with more quickly. What’s going wrong now Currently, it feels like you could have walked to your destination by the time you’ve waited through boarding calls for all the various levels of travelers, from elite down to the dregs of refundable coach. Moreover, once you scan your pass and enter the jetway, you find it’s packed with all those who were crammed up around the ticket scanner a few minutes before – affectionately called “gate lice.” One big contributor to this logjam is the common airline policy to charge fo...

Air fares for U.S. domestic flights sink to their lowest levels 57 days before departure, on average, according to a Wall Street Journal report of an Airline Reporting Corporation study that looked at sales through online and traditional travel agencies but not through airlines directly. That’s well before the average purchase date, which is just over 1 month before departure. Fares bought in the U.S. for international flights hit their lowest levels 171 days prior to the flight date. Looking for an airfare deal? Your odds improve if you buy on the weekend. A new deep dive into airline fares suggests Sunday is the best day to find low fares. This is a departure from the conventional wisdom of recent years, when Tuesday was considered the best bet . Airlines Reporting Corp., which processes tickets for travel agencies and handles about half of all tickets sold, tallied up ticket sales. Over a 19-month period ending in July, 130 million domestic and international round-trip tic...

Airline pilots and crews may be at increased risk for melanoma, a new review has found. Melanoma is a deadly form of skin cancer that starts in the melanocytes, the cells that produce skin pigment. According to the National Cancer Institute, there are about 76,000 cases and 10,000 deaths a year from the disease in the United States. The analysis, online at JAMA Dermatology, used data from 19 studies that included more than 266,000 subjects. It found that airline crews had about twice the incidence of melanoma as the general population, and a melanoma death rate 42 percent higher. The authors acknowledged that all the studies were observational, and that most were retrospective. In addition, they did not account for skin type; it may be that fair-skinned people, who are more subject to melanoma, are more likely to work in flight-related occupations. The reason is unclear, but ultraviolet A radiation exposure, which at 30,000 feet is twice what it is on the ground, is a well-e...

THE news that a passenger jet had been shot down on July 17th, apparently following the bungled targeting of a surface-to-air missile, was met with horror. Along with many other questions about the tragedy, some have wondered what Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was doing flying over eastern Ukraine, which has been the setting of a low-intensity war for several months. Since the downing of MH17, commercial jets have steered clear of Ukraine (as can be seen on flight-tracking websites such as flightradar24, pictured). But how often do passenger planes normally fly over war zones? And how risky is it? Taking a detour to avoid an area of conflict means spending more time in the air, burning more fuel. So airlines go direct if they consider it safe. Malaysia Airlines was not the only operator crossing eastern Ukraine at the time of the tragedy. L980, the route in question, was the flight path chosen by many passenger jets travelling between the big cities of Europe and South Asia. In fa...

Operator and integrator Hub One, which specializes in professional solutions, ran an experiment at the Parus Charles de Gaulle airport to test 4G-LTE in partnership with Alcatel-Lucent. The goal of that experiment is to test the very high bandwidth mobile network LTE technology in a real world setting for airport mission critical systems such as anticollision systems, air ground data transfers, surveillance cameras for baggage sorting zones, operational communications with intervention vehicles, multimedia communications between ground personnel and control towers... In order to run that experi,ent, a state of the art Alcatel-Lucent LTE network was setup. An ePC (evolved Packet Core) with 3 eNode B base stations were deployed. The first base station covers the aircraft zone, the second covers the baggage sorting zone and the thrid one covers the passenger zone. They were set to work with a 700 MHz frequency. Mobile LTE routers were also installed onboard aircrafts and interventi...

GE has just revealed the private leaderboard on Flight Quest 2 -- and four outstanding winners from the Kaggle community.  Flight Quest 2 began last August as the second part in GE’s Industrial Internet Flight Quest, in partnership with Alaska Airlines and Kaggle. They challenged data scientists around the world to develop algorithms to increase flight efficiencies in real time, reducing delays and maximizing a flight’s profitability. Using national airspace data provided by Flight Stats, the winning Flight Quest 2 algorithms determine the most efficient flight routes, speeds and altitudes at any moment taking into account variables such as weather, wind, and airspace restraints. The winning model by José Fonollosa proved to be up to 12 percent more efficient when compared to data sets from actual flights. GE plans to develop rapid prototyping from these algorithms to deliver a first-of-a-kind solution that will give pilots and dispatchers a prescriptive, network-wide view of ...