March 2008 Archives

The meltdown at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 continues. The BBC is reporting that British Airways is admitting that they have fifteen thousand stranded bags at Heathrow and that a internal source admits that the number could go as high as twenty thousand.

How badly bungled has this opening been? Well, it turns out that BA’s own employees couldn’t even find the right parking garage when they reported to work on day one.

Amusingly, BA’s own website claims that “It shouldn’t take long to get from Check-in to Departures.” They apparently left out the bit where passengers sit for hours and hours in Departures waiting for flights that never take off….

So these guys out in Europe are building a a super huge particle collider, right? So these other guys are trying to sue to stop it from going into operation, ok?

The reason given is a new one in law—apparently they’re concerned that the collider will accidentally make a mini-black hole, and that mini-black hole will become somewhat larger than mini as it consumes the entire Earth.

That’s not likely to happen though. We think.

You might want to hold off on those cheap flights to Europe if you were planning on being routed through Heathrow.

Admittedly, going through Heathrow has never been a walk in the park, at least based on my experience of last year, but this sounds like it's going to a whole different level....

Coming soon, at least according to this Times article about the ‘open skies’ agreement with the EU that comes into effect at the end of the month. Apparently RyanAir is proposing base prices as low as 10 euros, but only from secondary airports to secondary airports. Hmm… I wonder if New Haven is in their plans.

I think that in practice, there will be an immediate and sudden drop in prices as airlines scramble to establish mindshare, but that prices will subsequently start to creep back up as things shake out.

Now, if there were only open skies agreements with Asia….

Related: Time on the homeless problem at Heathrow. As far as I can tell, this isn’t as big a problem at the airports that I tend to frequent, though having said that, it’s quite possible that the homless people at JFK do a pretty good job of disguising themselves (or they hang out at different terminals).

On a meta note, it should be interesting to see what this post does to the Google ads I get….

Jellyfish, originally uploaded by Frankenstein.

One from the archives....

Well,this and the USC game, too.

Pink Roses, originally uploaded by Frankenstein.

Testing posting from Flickr, which hasn't worked in dog years.