Travel articles
Obama Inauguration and Air Travel Around Washington DC
Tuesday, January 20 will not only mark an historical inauguration, but should see record numbers flying into the Washington DC area. No doubt, chaos is bound to be part of... More on Ditching Planes and the A320's Water-Friendly Design
Most flight crews get at least one day of training in a pool in swimsuits for that rarest of airline disasters, a ditching. If you think that sounds fun, you're wrong. Among other things, you have to demonstrate that you're a strong swimmer and that you're capable of climbing into and out of one of those inflatable evacuation chutes, which become life rafts in the water.
Who Wants a Pleistocene-Era Backyard?
While casting about for feel-good stories, we remembered the lost and starving Magellanic penguins that were airlifted to safety by the Brazilian army last fall. The young penguins, whose home is in the southern Atlantic, had wandered too far north, washing up on the warm beaches of Brazil by the hundreds, and the situation looked grim when "animal-welfare activists loaded the birds onto a Brazilian air force cargo plane and flew them 1,550 miles to the country's southern coast, where a crowd of onlookers celebrated as the penguins marched back into the sea." Definite feel-good material.
Vieques: Undiscovered and undeveloped
Relax on virginal white beaches once the property of the U.S. Navy, and stay at a stylish boutique hotel--no megaresorts here.
"In the Event of a Water Landing": What Flight Training Says About Ditching
Jan. 15: Today, the coldest day of the season, saw the unreal spectacle of 155 passengers and crew ditching US Airways flight 1549, bound for Charlotte in a ice cold Hudson River just minutes after it had taken off from LaGuardia.
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