News and notes from around the interweb:
- Delta announced a disappointing new seat for its Boeing 767-400s in April, failing to live up to CEO Ed Bastian’s promise to use the Delta One Suite with doors. The first plane has been refurbished here are photos.
- Academics who fly more earn more though flying doesn’t correlate with scholarly productivity. Environmental scholars do not fly less, even for purely discretionary trips.
- JFK airport supervisor took bribes to allow foreign governments to overnight their planes
- Good plan.
- Woman deported back to the UK when US immigration found two year old texts mentioning cocaine on her phone. She reports she has several friends in recovery.
- Virgin Atlantic’s new Los Angeles – Manchester flight is part of ‘huge growth plan’
- Parked Boeing 737 MAXs.
Absolutely shocking, the experience of the young British woman. But I am not surprised.
My daughter is a US citizen, born and raised here in the US. She has a strong resemblance to Kate Middleton. Several years ago she was detained in Miami on her incoming flight from Paris, and questioned by half a dozen Customs and Border Control agents about her travel: Why did she travel to Europe? What countries did she visit there? Why had she stayed so long (almost 3 months)? How could she afford it? How could she, at 24, have saved enough money to stay that long? Why had she chosen Europe, when the US was so much better a place to visit? And why was she returning to the USA?
The worst part of all this was when they continued to ask her, over and over again, why she was returning. Her reply of “I live here” and “I am a citizen” and “I am going back to my parents’ house” did not satisfy them. She was grilled for almost 4 hours on this, over and over again, while I sat on the other side of the partition and waited, not knowing what had happened to her after her plane had landed.
Absolutely surreal Orwellian experience—this is not the same America I knew as a child.
The two British women were removed from the US probably because CBP thought the story of what they would be doing in California and New York didn’t add up or that they were going to work illegally in the US. The questions and phone searches suggest that the CBP probably wanted to see if the two British women were involved in the prostitution and/or drug trade.
Two females being unemployed acting school students/actors with no firm reasons to go back to their country of legal residence/citizenship, no proper hotel booking, and “too little” money for a several week stay seems like a recipe to have trouble with CBP at LAX? Can’t say I’m surprised they had a problem. A pair of women coming into there under such circumstances and being checked for involvement in the drug and/or prostitution trade or “hook-ups” in the entertainment industry? It’s not the first time that young adult females, when considered attractive by border control types, end up in secondary and more likely to be removed. It happens at times to some young American women coming to the UK too, but then it’s mainly to solo American women with barely used, new passports “meeting”’ some guy they “know” from the internet.
Kind of surprising that Delta is putting such a crappy product out, in direct contrast to what they advertised. I don’t think much of Delta, but they’re normally smarter than to directly contradict themselves in public.
@Christian – to be fair they only told EMPLOYEES about suites with doors (which I leaked), they hadn’t promised to publicly