Gotta love Air Canada:  The airline announced that in response to lower fuel costs, they wil drop their 2nd bag fee (previously $25).  And in another consumer-friendly announcement, they will build fuel surcharges into base fares, so that if you see a $159 flight, it actually costs $159 (rather than $159 plus $30 in fuel surcharges).  I expect exactly zero other airlines to do the same, but we should give credit where it’s due.  Well done.

I’ve seen a bunch of articles this morning suggesting that Qantas has canceled its plans to offer Internet access on the A380 due to fears that passengers will spend the whole flight surfing porn (American Airlines flight attendants are asking the airline to put filtering software on their Internet service.  For its part, the airline says passengers have been bringing porn on planes for years and there are ways of dealing with it.  I’m not sure what that means.)  In any case, Qantas is now saying that porn had nothing to do with the decision and that there were simply technical issues.  Technical issues downloading porn, perhaps.

Spanish authorities have released a preliminary report about the Spanair crash that killed 154 people last month.  As a government official notes, aircraft accidents tend to happen for multiple reasons.  In this case investigators are pointing to two concerns:  a cockpit alert system failed to notify pilots that the wing flaps had not extended correctly; and that a temperature gauge had overheated.  However, they do not yet know if the cockpit alert system failure, the failure for the flaps to extend, and the temperature gauge are related.

You’ll note that this is why I (and others) tend to say that initial reports about airplane crashes are so ridiculous.  The talk of old planes, unreliable eyewitness accounts, and other nonsense is never the reason.  Airplanes are extremely complex systems.  And as Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in his first article* for the New Yorker, complex systems simply have more opportunities for things to go wrong, and the more small things that go wrong, the more likely it is that a combination of those small things will lead to a disaster (as a side note, that article is still a great read.)

*As detail-oriented reader Doug has pointed out, while Gladwell mentions the above point, that is not the crux of the article (the crux of the article, according to detail-oriented reader Doug is that as technology has made systems safer, engineers are willing to take greater risks, thereby counteracting any safety benefit that had been developed.)  Carry on…

United has heard your griping about checked bag fees and in response they’ve made some changes.  Specifically, the response was “Go Screw Yourself, We’re Doubling the Fee.”  United has joined Delta in charging $50 for a second checked bag.  As today’s Wall St Journal points out, Southwest hasn’t gained any extra business because they aren’t charging fees.  So while you can complain all you want, if you were running United, you’d do exactly the same thing.

Passengers on an Air Berlin flight from Nuremberg to Faro, Portugal, forced the airline to change their aircraft after 2 unrelated delays.  The plane was originally delayed and returned to the terminal after a cockpit display was broken.  The plane was fixed and taxied again, only to have a flight attendant pass out.  Passengers, who were possibly jittery after the recent Spanair crash in Madrid, passed around a petition to change airplanes (even though the first thing was minor and the second had nothing to do with the plane).  Air Berlin, sensing a riot, change airplanes (though I’m not sure why).

I was away over the weekend, so I wasn’t going to write anything today, but as one of my kids was up in the middle of the night Sunday I checked the news and saw that the writer David Foster Wallace had killed himself.  If you’re familiar with him, you’ve likely already read any number of memorials about him.

But if you haven’t read anything by him, I don’t think there was a writer in the 1990s and 2000s who defined self-referential, post-modernist 30something writing like Wallace (I don’t mean that in a bad way…)  I won’t blather on here, but if you care at all about travel writing, you would be doing yourself a favor by checking out his long piece about a Caribbean Cruise he took called “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.”   It’s funny and sad and like nearly everything he wrote, as much a meditation on what we notice about our surroundings as much as it is a travelogue.  The essay is available in a collection of stories by the same name.

His piece about the Illinois State Fair called “Getting Away From Pretty Much Being Away From It All” shows that even when you travel, you can still go home again.  He walks an amazing line between mockery and complete understanding of the visitors to the fair.  Again, sounds silly, but it’s a wonderful piece of writing.

And while it borders just on the right side of an animal rights treatise, his piece “Consider the Lobster” about traveling to a lobster festival in Maine makes you think about lobsters, and morality and thinking.

(And for fun, his piece about the Adult Video News Awards, available in the collection also called “Consider the Lobster” is hilarious and ridiculous.)  And his piece about talk radio in LA called Host (viewable here), which was as much about the footnotes to the article, as it was about talk radio.  And on an on…

I don’t know why I was so moved by reading about his death, but I know that nearly everything I read by him made me think about each topic in a different way.  As a reader, you can’t ask for much more.

The impending arrival of Hurricane Ike has caused Continental to close its Houston hub operation until Sunday morning.  Some flights will also be canceled on Sunday, so check with the airline if you have travel on Sunday on Continental.  You can make a one-time change for free or, if your flight has been canceled, get a refund from the airline.  To avoid what must be ridiculous numbers of calls to the 800#, you can manage your flights online.

Longtime reader IAH-PHX can tell us the last time he remembers Continental closing down Houston for a storm – I don’t remember it ever happening…

British leisure tour (and airline) operator XL Leisure shut down, stranding about 85,000 people around the world (about 10,000 people were flying their airline, XL Airways).

Bookmaker Paddy Power had put out a list on Wednesday of airlines it thought would shut down, and XL wasn’t on the list – but bettors put so much money on XL, that they had to close betting.  In case you were wondering, Air Berlin is the next best guess to close down (7-1 odds) and Vueling follows at 8-1.

In response to US criticism of Venezuela’s airport security, the Venezuelan government has told US carriers that they must reduce the number of flights to Caracas by the end of September.  Schedule changes have not yet been announced, but if you’re traveling to Caracas after September, you’re going to want to call your airline to make sure you’re still going to Caracas after September.

In case you were wondering how big a difference it makes when airlines add a first checked bag fee, Continental has given us a bit of a clue:  The carrier says that the new fee will generate $100 million in revenue and cost savings (the cost savings come from people not checking as much baggage because they have to pay for it).  They don’t break out how much revenue is generated vs. how much cost is saved, but what’s interesting is that the biggest outcome of the first checked bag fee is probably that most people will only check one bag (rather than two) and that, in general, people will pack less stuff.  Which makes me wonder what the hell I’ve been dragging around in my bags all these years.