One Mile at a Time

The new Berlin Brandenburg airport is the most quiet and lovely I've seen to date: https://onemileatatime.com/berlin-brandenburg-airport-review/

Great, until they rename the aircraft like they did for the MAX... https://onemileatatime.com/boeing-737-8/

The absurd restrictions on knives really needs to go. A blade is a necessary tool for a lot of people in everyday life. It's time to get over the unfounded fear and face reality like adults. It's especially ridiculous because of how ineffective it is, https://onemileatatime.com/tsa-fails-tests-95-percent/. This is a worthless waste of resources that only serves to inconvenience regular people and give the masses some feel good security theatre.

Your read is exactly correct - the frequent flyer costs aren't 'fully loaded', and accounting rules in the US have changed to more fully account for these costs. That said, the logic behind structuring the rules this way isn't completely crazy. Essentially, award seats are intended to be seats that the airline cannot sell to paying passengers. Since those seats would otherwise earn the airline nothing, accounting for them on a strictly 'found-money' basis makes some sense. This sometimes creates amusing situations when new loyalty program managers look at their margins and conclude massive sales make sense. For one example, see below - Garuda selling ~$20,000 first class tickets for ~$200 worth of points. On an internal accounting basis, this was still profitable for the program! https://onemileatatime.com/garuda-indonesia-first-class-award-ticket-d…

> I think what he means is that first class is now very rare, except on A380s That would still be wrong. Most decent First Class cabins these days are on 777s: https://onemileatatime.com/best-first-class/

> Boeing and the airlines should have provided more simulators if their new model is so different that it needs a dedicated simulator I highly recommend reading this article: https://onemileatatime.com/boeing-737-max-lion-air-simulator/#boeing_m… The first crash was with Lion Air. Boeing mocked them for wanting simulators. After the crash, Boeing claimed pilots of Lion Air were at fault. This while saying no simulator training was needed.

Google Fi’s support might be great. But you have to pay for it through Google Payments which is another potential single point of failure. If you ever trip any of their fraud flags you’ll probably never be allowed to pay for anything through google again, and good luck getting it fixed. https://onemileatatime.com/google-fi-review/

According to this [0], there's quite some caveat for airline pilots in China. I was going to quote parts of it, but it's all quite insightful that, making 150k-300k is not quite how it goes. Take a read. [0] https://onemileatatime.com/expat-pilots-in-asia/

> Wouldn't surprise me if this newfound paranoia leads to a golden age for cybersecurity, and a wave of new best practices. I'd be shocked if this happened. This requires politicians to both care about and understand cybersecurity enough to enforce it, and for there to be no opportunists looking to cash in on the ignorance of policy makers. People demanded more security after 9/11. We got the Patriot Act and the TSA, so the government spies on its own people and an agency that has proven 95% (!!!) of the time to fail to detect a weapon. https://onemileatatime.com/tsa-fails-tests-95-percent/ Ronald Reagon declared a war on drugs - I've already made this comment too political so I won't delve into that. For anything complicated enough the general public cannot easily understand it, there is no incentive for politicians to actually care about it. They can just give it lip service with a few talking points and then never actually do anything actionable.

While Google Fi appears to offer better security than other US-based carriers, the support team needs work: Why I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi https://onemileatatime.com/google-fi-review/ > I’ve been fiercely evangelical about Project Fi since Google launched their cell phone service a few years ago. ... I think it’s important to update y’all about some recent experiences and research, along with why I am withdrawing my endorsement. > ... > Previously, whenever I had issues with my Pixel 2 or prior Fi-enabled devices, the third-party support center was phenomenal. I’ve had them help me with hardware issues, system issues, a phone that just wouldn’t connect to WiFi, or tethering that didn’t work when it was supposed to — every interaction was great, and resulted in the problem being solved. > Since November, this has not been the case. My calls and chats to support have gone nowhere, and the once-great support staff have been replaced (or supplemented) by random people using generic scripts. I’m sure the awesome trouble-shooters are still there, but the sampling I’ve seen doesn’t suggest pervasive competency. EDIT: Actually there is another, possibly more serious issue with Google Fi mentioned in the article: > If you can’t use Google Payments, you can’t pay for Google Fi > ... > Getting this fixed is actually impossible, and I say that as someone who really, truly, loves solving problems and has made a living off getting phone agents to want to help me. > We…

Blogspam. original story: https://onemileatatime.com/news/two-american-planes-same-callsign-same…

I can't speak for the EU, but this article was interesting. It sounds like a big part of it is that Ryanair's costs were simply less to start. https://onemileatatime.com/insights/why-spirit-fail-ryanair-thrives/

https://onemileatatime.com/news/people-losing-global-entry/ Papers please.

It's said here [0] that they make an average of $160,970 a year. That's not... rich, not in 2025. That's comfortable in most major American cities, but not rich. And then you have to take into account the fact that these pilots are away from home quite often, and have dozens, if not hundreds, of lives in their hands when they do their jobs, and that makes me think they're fairly compensated for doing the actual labor that the company needs to operate. Meanwhile, the CEOs make more in a year than most Americans will make in an entire lifetime [1]. And that's not even getting into some of the dividends that airlines pay people who just happen to possess a piece of paper. [0]https://simpleflying.com/salary-us-pilot-2025/ [1]https://onemileatatime.com/insights/highest-paid-airline-ceo/

"United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby earned $33.9 million in 2024, compared to $18.6 million in 2023, and $9.8 million in 2022" https://onemileatatime.com/insights/highest-paid-airline-ceo/ He must know something, right? And it seems he knows more and more as the years go by.

> When visual approaches are allowed, controllers can tell pilots to maintain visual separation from other aircraft, so they don’t have to leave as much of a buffer as with an instrument landing (where it’s entirely on the controllers to provide proper spacing). From an incident at SFO where a Luftansa plane was not allowed to perform a landing using visual separation at night, and therefore was delayed interminably: https://onemileatatime.com/news/lufthansa-a350-oakland-diversion/

>Egypt Exposes Me For Lying About Airport, Provides Video Evidence https://onemileatatime.com/news/egypt-exposes-me-lying-airport-video/

> A nice 300% tax on air travel and suddenly you don't need to go to New Zeeland for a weekend anymore. And ad and tax-exemption for air travel is the opposite of it. NZ just raised their tourist tax... https://onemileatatime.com/news/new-zealand-tourist-tax/

Some airlines (Air Canada, in particular) are ramping up their attacks outside of just technical means [1]. It's a pretty sad state of affairs, but it seems some airlines would rather throw lawyers at a problem than let their users have a better experience. [1]: https://onemileatatime.com/news/airlines-shut-down-websites-scraping-a…

This is just not going work in a customer centric organization. If SABRE gave out PNRs like, I don't know, SEXGOD, it would make customers angry, and that is not even with any curse words. They are heavily filtered. https://onemileatatime.com/insights/funny-airline-pnr/

I flew a Lufthansa A340 to Cape Town. Very nice plane. They have quite a quirky feature: there are toilets in the cargo hold, with steps leading down to them [0]. I liked it - the area is good for stretching your legs and it was a bit of a social hub. [0] https://onemileatatime.com/insights/lufthansa-a340-cargo-hold-bathroom…

They aren't alone - here's a college student who also commute by commercial flights to avoid high local rents: https://onemileatatime.com/news/college-student-flies-classes/

Not all Airports do, this incident at JFK happened not long ago and could have been a massive disaster: https://onemileatatime.com/news/american-777-delta-737-nearly-collide-…

Apparently, Qatar Airways CEO of 27 years abruptly resigned in October and the new one stated that creating “a culture of trust and empowerment will be the building blocks of our shared success.” [1] So things might be changing. [1] https://onemileatatime.com/news/new-qatar-airways-ceo/

They didn't even bring up being armed in the cockpit: https://onemileatatime.com/news/delta-pilot-pulls-gun-captain/ That was last month.

>There is no forces that would change this when applied to trains. I'm not sure how successful it's been, but this article[1] for Deutsche Bahn's "ICE" first class makes it look attractive to me. I think because space isn't as much a premium, the upcharge for first class on a train can be a much smaller jump than the economy -> first class jump on a plane. [1] https://onemileatatime.com/deutsche-bahn-ice-first-class-review/

Aren't iMessages free on most in-flight wifi's today[1]? Also: I tried this on a United/KLM flight recently, and it didn't work for me. [1] https://onemileatatime.com/news/united-airlines-free-inflight-messagin…

Air Canada used to have some direct flights Toronto<->Mumbai that are now unviable because of the russian airspace restrictions. So it now stops over in London under 5th freedom rights to refuel/load/unload passengers and continue. This London<->Mumbai leg is one of the few unusual routes that Air Canada flies that doesn't start or stop in Canada. (It probably could be viable direct with limited passengers/cargo, but financially unviable). https://onemileatatime.com/news/air-canada-london-mumbai-flight/ But if you fly this route on Air India, it's still non-stop, utilizing Russian airspace: https://flightaware.com/live/flight/AIC188/history/20230610/1625Z/CYYZ…

Resort fees are still everywhere. You gotta pay for that pool access and two water bottles per day! At least Marriott will start displaying them in the booking process: https://onemileatatime.com/news/marriott-display-rates-transparently-r…

Interesting, link: https://onemileatatime.com/news/qatar-airways-pilot-loses-situational-…