News and Notes from Around the Interweb:
- A fascinating story from Ask the Pilot on what really happened in the Air France Concorde crash in 2000 — faulty repair to a landing gear, overweight aircraft, error in shutting down an engine, in addition to the piece of metal of the Continental jet.
- Buying MyVanilla debit cards with a credit card and taking the money out at a bank.
- The Hampton Inn Logan Airport leaks that the first quarter HHonors promotion will be double miles or points between January 7 and March 31.
- In a first-ever legal action to enforce a 2004 California privacy law, that state’s attorney general is suing Delta for failing to include a privacy policy in its mobile app. The airline faces penalties of up to $2500 for each of the millions of downloads of the app.
- China will be introducing 72 hour waiver of visa for arrivals at Beijing Capital Airport in 2013, much as they do at Shanghai Pudong airport (which is 48 hours). It’ll only be available for citizens of certain countries, including the US, who are arriving from one country and in transit to another.
I am surprised that CO was made to pay 1 million Euros compensation in the Concorde crash when in addition to the pilot errors, overweight, and faulty landing gear, there is a clearly a flaw in the Concorde to allow a burst tire, which happens on occasion, could damage the fuel tanks. But it any event it seems like something other than the tire caused the crash.
The visa deal at PEK is huge…but I guess risking a phantom booking to BKK or HKG and then returning to the USA instead…thus running afoul of the Chinese authorities would NOT be the safest route for me, would it?
I’d rather just get an actual visa if i were making Beijing my destination and not merely a stopover enroute to a third country.
And yet another Concorde conspiracy theory. “European investigators do not want to know”, but this Patrick has the real story. Yeah, right. In any commercial aviation crash there’re lot of factors involved, it’s never a single one. France has the bad habit of also taking punishing legal action by their criminal investigators (not he same as the aviation safety investigators, Compare NTSB to FBI).
They did the same to Air France (447) and many French pilots. That attitude is not good for safety, but their aviation investigators have a many decades long good an dprofessional trackrecord. All these stories, that might have a point sometimes, turn the hard en sometimes unpleasant reality into another ‘cover up’. Please do not post this kind of nonsense.
The privacy thing is ridiculous. No one reads these policies anyway. But more money to the lawyers.
What would be great is a few standardized competing privacy policies, similar to open-source software licenses. In that world, if software code is under the Apache license or GPL3 or whatever, it is very clear what that means, no need to read the license for every new piece of software encountered. Wonder why this hasn’t happened yet for privacy policies and site use policies and, in fact, commercial software product licenses (EULA).
Do they have a similar program for Hong Kong? Would be nice.
@Gary Steiger there’s no advance visa required for most to enter Hong Kong.
Do you have to buy a Hong Kong visa upon arrival?
It would be nice to visit Hong Kong for a few days while traveling on Cathay Pacific from San Francisco to elsewhere.
Thanks.
@Gary Steiger – it’s free, no paperwork….
Delta just released an update for their iphone app with a link to their privacy policy.