- This just in…Ryan Air (Ireland’s budget airline) is considering charging passengers for using the toilet on board: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7914542.stm
- Interesting article on what keeps a plane in the air (and the ways that ice can counteract that) in Salon’s “Ask the Pilot” feature at: http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2009/02/27/askthepilot311/
- From Edward Hasbrouck’s blog on the recent episode of the Amazing Race TV show: http://www.hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/001631.html , Edward also provides links to a Wikipedia list of low cost airlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_low-cost_airlines. These airlines generally do not pay to be in the GDS (the airline reservation service that travel agencies and online booking engines use to compare prices and book flights). He also offers this useful ink to Airline route maps, http://www.airlineroutemaps.com/Europe/index.shtml , so you can see which airline flies where. (Please double-check with the airline’s own site or your travel consultant, as some of the information on these sites might be out of date or incomplete.)
- The top 20 most popular airline routes (in terms of the number of passengers flying them) according to Globalization and World Cities Research Network. (http://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/rb/rb152.html)
| Rank | Connection | Number of passengers | |
| 1. | Hong Kong | Taipei | 2,138,484 |
| 2. | Los Angeles | New York | 1,697,593 |
| 3. | London | New York | 1,609,337 |
| 4. | Melbourne | Sydney | 1,563,106 |
| 5. | Milan | Rome | 1,518,767 |
| 6. | Cape Town | Johannesburg | 1,406,897 |
| 7. | Los Angeles | San Francisco | 1,375,660 |
| 8. | Amsterdam | London | 1,242,550 |
| 9. | Chicago | New York | 1,182,326 |
| 10. | Bangkok | Hong Kong | 1,141,062 |
| 11. | London | Paris | 1,060,999 |
| 12. | Dublin | London | 1,050,940 |
| 13. | Marseilles | Paris | 1,044,128 |
| 14. | Bangkok | Singapore | 1,024,818 |
| 15. | Rio De Janeiro | Sao Paulo | 992,775 |
| 16. | Boston | New York | 988,976 |
| 17. | Miami | New York | 955,838 |
| 18. | Atlanta | New York | 935,265 |
| 19. | Las Vegas | Los Angeles | 924,732 |
| 20. | New York | San Francisco | 909,514 |