The airplane tray table . . . so small, so uneven, so . . . so upright and locked before landing. Why do they have to mess with a good thing?

First it was advertising on the tray table. I wasn’t a big fan of the half-naked dude advertising clothes at Dillard’s, but the Verizon ad wasn’t too horribly offensive. Now they’ve moved one step further and started selling space to Business Week. US Airways will be happily displaying the content soon.

So what is this content exactly? Well, it will be “written by some of BusinessWeek’s most popular columnists, including former GE CEO Jack Welch and his wife Suzy; the world’s most renowned wine critic, Robert M. Parker; and CNBC’s Closing Bell anchor Maria Bartiromo.”

Why do you do this to me?

I have a problem . . . if something in my line of sight can be read, I’ll read it. And since aisle, middle, and window seats will have different columns, I’ll read those too. And then, when I’m trying to relax, I’ll end up reading them again. I just can’t stop reading if something is in front of me, and that’s going to be really annoying. If I really wanted to read Business Week, I’d get a copy myself.

I understand the appeal to the advertisers. It’s a captive audience that now won’t even have to open a magazine to see the content. That’s a strong selling point, but not for the guy stuck on the plane. Think they’ll include some advertorials on there as well?

And what’s next? Digital media that keeps changing every few minutes? Maybe my tray table will start talking to me? Hmm, I’ll have to remember to keep my knives off the table . . . who knows what it’ll be capable of soon.

Speaking of Eero Saarinen-designed terminals . . . let’s check in on Washington/Dulles. When was I speaking about Sarrinen terminals, you ask? Well, both JFK’s terminal 5 (from yesterday’s post) and the main terminal at Dulles were designed by Saarinen. Unfortunately, he died in 1961, a year before both structures opened to passengers.

Had Saarinen been around long enough to actually try flying out of Dulles, he would probably have quickly learned what a painful place it can be. Why is it so painful?

The mobile lounge.

Back in the day, the idea was an interesting one. You would check in for your flight and then wait to have a mobile lounge take you directly to your plane. Unfortunately, it’s not as idyllic as it sounds. The mobile lounges create a lot of ground traffic, and if there was one lounge per plane, it would be like rush hour gridlock on the beltway. So, back in the mid-1980′s, they built the first of the “temporary” midfield concourses. More than 20 years later, that temporary building is still there.

Now, you hop on a mobile lounge and wait for what seems like an eternity (but is probably only 2 minutes). Finally, they drive you over to the midfield concourse and then you hop off to find your gate, which could be quite a ways away. Fortunately, the death of the mobile lounge is coming in 2009 with the opening of the AeroTrain.

They’ve been working on a big Dulles enhancement program in recent years, and it’s a welcome undertaking. If you’d like to read about everything they’re doing/have done, click here.

The most important enhancements that have yet to be finished are:

• A new runway to increase capacity
• A new, permanent midfield Concourse C/D
• The AeroTrain

The train will take you from the main terminal to three location at first: Concourse A, Concourse B, and the future home of Concourse C. If this doesn’t make sense, check out this map.

You can see that it’s all set up nicely, except for Concourse C/D. That temporary concourse really is going to go away (though I can’t find a projected date), and when it does the AeroTrain will stop right underneath the nice new concourse. Until that time, there will still be a walk from the stop. As if C/D could get any worse.

Either way, it’s better than the mobile lounge. No more waiting for traffic to cross, no strange detours around obstacles. Just an easy train that goes back and forth with ease.

So, let’s begin the 2 year countdown until the death of the mobile lounge . . . a great idea that in practice was absolutely terrible.

JFK, originally uploaded by maxpower33.

I spend so much of my airport posts focused on LAX that I thought it would be nice to check in on the east coast and see what’s new. In this post, I’ll check in on the new JetBlue terminal at JFK.

Anyone who has flown JetBlue into New York/JFK knows that it’s not easy. Sure the terminal has wi-fi and good food, but it is just about maxed out with flights and travelers.

JetBlue anticipated this long ago and they’ve had a new terminal in the works. It’s quite convenient that right next door to their terminal 6 is the long vacant terminal 5. You’ve seen pictures of terminal 5. It’s an architectural icon, the former home of TWA at JFK. Well, JetBlue has bulldozed everything behind the main structure and built their own terminal., as you can see above.

The terminal structure appears to be mostly complete, well in advance of it’s scheduled opening next year. It will give the airline some much-needed space to stretch out and most importantly it will make life easier for travelers.

Ah, Memorial Day. The start of summer and the start of airline delay season. Is there anything worse than getting stuck in a thunderstorm in Chicago and not being able to do anything except sit on terminal hold and hope for some agent in India to pick up the phone before you get to the front of the airport line? Fortunately, the mobile phone is the next frontier when it comes to travel, and there are some pretty helpful applications out there right now that can help you out this summer.

Find On Time Status

This is probably the most useful thing you can find on your phone. If you need to pick someone up or you just want to know their flight status, your only option used to be to call the airline if you weren’t near a computer. Now there are plenty of places you can go using your cell phone.

If you think about it when you’re at home, you can go to some airlines’ websites and sign up for flight alerts. American is one that does that. But this doesn’t work for all airlines. You can sign up for alerts for all airlines from FlightAware in advance, but that also requires forethought.

Another option is to use one of several SMS services. Send a text message with the airline and flight number and you’ll get an instant text message back with flight information. You can text Google at, um, Google (466453) (at left) or you can text 4INFO at, um, 4INFO (44636). Both are free, but I like 4INFO because it’s more flexible. For example, with 4INFO you can send a message that says “UA LAX ORD” and it will give you a full list of the flights operating that day. With Google, you need to know the flight number.

One quick note. Only the airline notification systems show gate to gate times. The rest of these will tell you when the plane leaves the departure runway and lands on the arrival one. So you’ll need to build in some extra padding if you’re picking someone up. Also, this information is only available for travel in the US, so international times aren’t very reliable, if they’re available at all.


Security Wait Times

It’s probably not well known that you can get projected security wait times on the TSA website. Now you can also get it on your cell phone. Text 4INFO with “wait” and the airport code and you’ll get the most recent estimated wait time for each terminal using history from the last month (at right). If your flight is at 7p, don’t send a text message at noon. You’ll get wait times for noon, and that won’t help.

FAA Airport Delays

I’m starting to sound like a commercial for 4INFO here, but I promise this is the last one. On the FAA website, you can search for delays by airport. This is especially helpful when the weather is bad or if you’re flying to O’Hare. Either way, there will be a lot of delays and you can get a heads up. You can also get this info by sending a text message to 4INFO saying “delay” and then the airport code (at right).

Book a Flight

Booking a flight is about as advanced as you can get using a cell phone, and for that reason it isn’t very popular in the US yet. I believe US Airways is the first US-based airline to announce it will offer mobile booking in the near future. You can go to usairways.com sometime soon and book yourself a trip. This is probably most helpful when you miss your connecting flight or the flight you’re on is canceled. You can just whip out your phone and beat everyone else to those few empty seats on the next flight. I’m guessing you’ll have to have a stored profile including a credit card on the site so that you can book quick and easily.

That brings me to the next cool thing – TripSync. This service lets you book travel in a variety of different ways including through your Microsoft Office calendar. It’s primarily for business travelers, but I signed up on my own so it seems anyone can use it. They’ve just introduced a mobile application so once you’re account is all set up, you can book while you’re on the road. Best of all, there is no fee, unlike most online travel agents.

As you can see at left, the interface looks pretty good on a PDA-sized screen. But when I tried to pull it up on my basic phone, it was definitely not so pretty. Still, it can get the job done and that’s what is most important.

So, happy summer travel season to everyone. I’ll be back on Tuesday after the long weekend.

Update 5/25 @ 1130a: Looks like Northwest actually now has mobile booking as well, beating US Airways to the punch.

In case you were wondering, no, I am not above using a Supertramp song title in my subject line to lure readers. (Would that really lure anyone?) Anyway . . .

The FAA came out with a groundbreaking program yesterday that will help speed up summer travel. In a nutshell, when there’s bad weather around, those flights that won’t be going through the bad weather won’t be delayed. Um, did I say groundbreaking? I may have to take that one back. How was this NOT happening before?!

Here’s a little more detail. Let’s say you’re in Chicago and a line of storms stands between you and your destination in Las Vegas. In the past, you would have had a ground delay program and you would have been stuck until cleared. Now, they’re saying that if you’re willing to load up on fuel, you can fly around the storms and then you won’t have a delay. Again, common sense, right?

Last year they did this for 7 northeast airports, but this year they’ll expand to 18 total airports including some in the Midwest. So is this one of the first flights to take advantage of the new policy? Thanks to FlightAware, you can see it went way south to get around the weather. (This shot shows the weather after it had moved further east.)

I don’t know. It seems like I’ve done this many times in the past. What is so different here?