First Step to a Great Airplane View: Get a Window Seat

Dead Sea Scrolls Go Digital

The Ethics of Nicholas Kristof’s Travels

The Art of Noticing: ‘People Don’t Notice That Noticing is Important!’

A Tourist With a Shovel and a Hoe

When she arrived in Kenya to volunteer with the Maasai, Daniela Petrova looked down her nose at tourists there to have a good time. But was her own motivation much different?

How Should I Spend My Time in Spain?

Vagabonding traveler Rolf Potts answers your questions about travel

Paul Theroux: Invisible Man on a Ghost Train

Jim Benning asks the author of “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star” about his new book, aging and the challenge of disappearing in the age of the BlackBerry

Eat Ceviche in Lima

Grab a Cusqueña and get comfortable. As Nicholas Gill explains, a trip to a Peruvian cevichería can be an all-day immersion in good conversation and raw seafood.

Unsentimental Journeys: Wrestling With Paul Theroux

Bronwen Dickey considers “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: 28,000 Miles in Search of the Great Railway Bazaar”

My Travels, My Feet

After taking one too many headless torso shots of herself, solo traveler Sophia Dembling started snapping photos of her feet around the world, from the Grand Canyon to Red Square

Seven Reasons to Have a Foreign Fling

Sure, having an overseas romance is fun. But Terry Ward points out seven other benefits to cross-border love, mon petit chou.

Did Pilots Fall Asleep? FAA Opens Investigation of go! Flight 1002.

Something similar happened many years ago, when the pilots on a major airline, can’t recall which one, fell asleep and overshot LAX.  After an investigation, the entire crew, flight attendants included, was fired.  Shouldn’t there be some kind of alarm that air traffic controllers can activate to wake up pilots if they fall asleep?

I was in the Air Force pre-Viet Nam as a back-end crew member.  We had our share of excitement...we got chased by Migs, but didn’t get caught; we experienced poor officers; we had other than smooth flights.
But, we never had the level of incompetence that would allow a flight crew to fall asleep at the controls.  That is not a dismissal offense. It is a prosecutable crime.  If the crew did fall asleep, they should GO! directly to jail.

NASA’s recent flight crew fatigue studies have been largely ignored by the FAA and airlines as a whole. Staffing airplanes with properly rested flight crews would cost the industry way too much money. Corporate practice has always been to put safety well behind profits. A few more incidents like the one in Hilo, combined with hull and passenger losses will cause real change to come about in the typically glacial manner that it does in the industry.