I just saw a TV news piece (UPD: and New York Times Travel wrote about it too) saying that new security measures on US flights require airlines to turn off maps on in-flight entertainment systems so terrorists would not know the airplane location.

This sounds ridiculous because, firstly, those maps are scarcely informative. Secondly, if a serious person is planning to blow an airplane in the sky over any particular point of interest, he probably knows the route by minutes, so he does not really need a map or any kind of location technology.

Now, think about the in-flight Internet. This is a service on the rise – American Airlines was going to launch it, and Virgin too – see http://blog.arrivedok.mobi/2008/06/25/internet-on-the-plane)? Will it be banned too for security reasons? Because if a passenger have an Internet connection and/or a GPS device he can easily detect the plane location.

I can easily imagine that much hyped (http://blog.arrivedok.mobi/2009/01/28/in-flight-calls-a-reality) in-flight mobile services like voice calls, mobile Internet, WAP, SMS can be banned too for similar reasons.

I can only hope that those travel restrictions will not affect our ArrivedOK Flight Arrival Tracker when it will be available in the US. Simply because its purpose is to track your mobile phone when you turn it on after landing and trigger the delivery of arrival alerts to your designated recipients. But who knows.

An interesting article by Susan Nielsen, The Oregonian:

Flight delays don’t bother me. Neither do cramped bathrooms, bad snacks, bag fees, even screaming babies. I’m one of those travelers so geekily enthralled with the miracle of flight that almost no inconvenience feels like a real problem.

Two commercial pilots for Northwest Airlines — one from Salem — earned global ridicule last week for overshooting their destination by 150 miles, falling out of radio contact for 90 minutes and nearly prompting military intervention for a flight with more than 140 passengers.

Read full article

An amazing skydiving stunt

I found this fascinating quote today:

Twitter has a huge aviation community – from airlines and airports, to cabin crew and aviation enthusiasts. Whether you like to fly a plane or just watch planes fly, there are lots of aviation geeks on Twitter with whom you can converse about your passions or just listen.Shashank Nigam, High Flying Tweets: 11 of the best airline or aviation bloggers / journalists to follow on Twitter, Aug 2009

You should read the whole article.

Watch ArrivedOK video tutorial in English updated with female character and voice-over. Learn how ArrivedOK looks like from the inside and how to use it – in only 3 minutes.