Travel Tips

The Travel Detective on September Travel, FAA Directives and High-Speed Trains

Locations in this article:  Paris, France San Diego, CA

Lonely buildingYou know what I always say: summer isn’t over until I say it’s over, and for the smart travelers, it’s just beginning.

When summer travelers empty out their vacation rentals and leave the beach, September becomes the magic month.

The day after Labor Day is when my summer starts.

OK, I let the cat out of the bag, but a lot of smart people will do that if they’re traveling to the Mediterranean, anywhere in the U.S., and most parts of Europe.

The ConcordeYou have to wonder about certain airlines and certain investigations. As you may know, I was the guy who did the Dateline piece earlier his year that exposed what really happened when the Concorde crashed outside of Paris more than nine years ago.

The same investigators—who I happen to think didn’t get that one right—are the ones investigating the Airbus 330 that went into the ocean between Brazil and France earlier this summer.

We may never know definitively what happened on that flight because they’ve been unable to recover the cockpit voice recorder or the flight data recorder.

But while we’re waiting for that report to come out, at least the FAA is doing something. They’re ordering all operators of the Airbus 330s and 340s in this country to replace certain airspeed probes on those planes.

FAA logoWe don’t know if the airspeed probes were the primary cause of that plane crash, but we do know they were some contributing factor.

Normally the FAA is moving glacier-like speeds, but this time they’re trying to make sure something is being done to mitigate the possibility of a similar situation happening with a U.S. operator of an Airbus 330 or 340.

In other airline news, a couple of weeks ago, I was the keynote speaker at the National Business Travel Association Convention in San Diego. Every year, I get a chance to moderate a panel where I grill the CEOs of major airlines—onstage for an hour and a half, no-holds-barred, no pre-arranged questions.

I sort of have them trapped on my tarmac. Every year I ask them if they want to announce anything. And every year they never have an announcement … until the next day.

Last year, Richard Anderson, chairman of Delta Air Lines, insisted they would never charge for checked bags. Twenty-four hours after he made that statement in front of 5,000 people at the convention, Delta announced the charge for checked bags.

Southwest logoThis year, I asked Gary Kelly the CEO of Southwest Airlines—an airline that steadfastly refused to charge for bags—whether he had any announcements, and he said “No.”

I said, “Does your ‘no’ mean that extends through today, or will you announce it tomorrow?”

He said, “Well, at least through this year.”

But guess what they just announced? If you want to board the plane early, you pay $10.

You know what? They’re probably going to generate a lot of revenue because some idiot always wants to be first. I don’t know what the tradeoff is there because you’ll still be stuck in the center seat between two sumo wrestlers no matter where you’re flying on Southwest.

Another big topic in travel: high-speed rail. It’s a wonderful idea that will happen in this country—but not in my lifetime.

Visit our Train Travel section to learn more.

Most of the money the federal government has earmarked for train improvement has really gone to maintain the current status of the tracks, which are in terrible condition to begin with. We need high-speed rail, especially in corridor markets of under 400 miles where it would ease airport congestion dramatically. Our Congress has not been able to connect the dots of the economic viability of high-speed rail.

As a result, we’re seeing the entire bus transportation get its act together on trips under 400 miles—that includes Megabus, BoltBus, Peter Pan, Greyhound, Limoliner—but in terms of high-speed rail, we really have an embarrassing system here in the U.S.

By Peter Greenberg for Peter Greenberg Worldwide Radio.

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