I swear, I’m going to have to change the name of this blog to Cranky Mythbusters, because there is just so much ridiculous stuff flying around the media right now. Once again, it’s my favorite whipping boy, the AP. This time, the title of the report is “Mid-air panic as plane plunges 26,000 feet.” Will someone please put a muzzle on these guys?

The story is this. A Ryanair flight was traveling from Bristol in the UK to Girona (outside Barcelona). It lost pressure at altitude and quickly descended in order to get to an altitude with breathable air, 8,000 feet. Then the plane diverted to Limoges, the nearest airport.

The AP article would make you believe that the plane plunged 26,000 feet as a result of the depressurization, but that’s absolutely ridiculous. The plane quickly descended because that’s how pilots are supposed to respond when the plane depressurizes.

See, those oxygen masks are attached to tanks that don’t have a ton of oxygen in them. They’re basically there to tide you over for a few minutes until you can get down to a level where you can breathe on your own. So as soon as a plane loses pressure, the pilots purposefully go into a steep descent to make sure that you don’t run out of oxygen. (The pilots, by the way, have more oxygen available for themselves.)

So the AP goes out there and hears the cries of terror from passengers and decides to pounce on it. The passengers were freaking out because, well, they were descending very quickly, and the pilots didn’t come on right away to say anything. You know why? The pilots were too busy actually trying to keep them from running out of air! Once the plane was stabilized at a lower altitude, they were able to come on and talk about what was happening, but priority number one is to get everyone to safety. Then they talk to the passengers.

If you’d like to learn more, I recommend going to this highly respectable report from the BBC that describes aircraft depressurization in much more detail. Kudos to them for actually reporting correctly on this. As for the AP, just ignore them.

Nobody has ever accused Ryanair of being a “nice” airline. On time? Yep. Cheap? Oh yeah. But if you’re looking for more than that, you’re in the wrong place. That’s why it’s no surprise that Ryanair is starting to crack down on how people buy tickets on the airline. To make sure you don’t get caught in the crossfire, if you fly these guys, you’ll want to book direct at ryanair.com.

So what exactly is going on here? I must admit, I had no idea this type of problem even existed. Companies can’t just start selling tickets on an airline unless they have access to the airline’s schedule, fares, and availability. When airlines participate in distribution systems like Sabre and Worldspan, travel agents all over gain access to that. When it comes to selling on the web, the big sellers will tend to have deals with the airlines directly that allow them to make more money from a sale as well.

Ryanair isn’t a fan of these things, so it doesn’t participate. The airline isn’t alone here. Airlines like Southwest have long shunned these distribution systems because it costs money. Southwest has recently begun playing more and more in the systems in order to get the business traveler, but you still won’t see them on any consumer-facing sites. Ryanair, as far as I can tell, doesn’t play with anyone and has really clamped down since they told everyone to stop selling their tickets back in May.

So I was surprised when I saw the news that Ryanair announced it would be canceling reservations that were booked on third party sites against their will. I couldn’t figure out how this was happening, but I think I get it now.

Some websites out there were scraping fare and availability info from the Ryanair website and then selling the tickets via their own interface. I have to assume this meant that they were just automatically making the bookings via Ryanair.com and then charging the passengers extra for it. Back in May, Ryanair told them to knock it off, and the bigger guys did. Some of them continued, and now Ryanair says it will cancel bookings made through those sites.

So, if you’re heading over to Europe and you want to fly Ryanair, you should really book direct. Or, if you just want to fly on those routes and you don’t care who it’s on, you should definitely shop around. The online travel agents are trying to fight Ryanair by giving good deals elsewhere. Check out CheapOair, for example. They’re offering 15% $15 off flights on routes that Ryanair flies as long as you fly on a DIFFERENT airline on that same route. It’s true that there aren’t many airlines that fly to Ryanair’s remote airport locations, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any overlap.

As far as I’m concerned, Ryanair has the right to do whatever they want with their own inventory. If they don’t want anyone else selling it, so be it. But as a consumer, I’d be happy to take advantage of the deals that seem to be popping up because of this spat. Do your homework, but if you choose Ryanair, make sure to book on their website so you don’t find yourself in trouble.

Edited @ 742a on 8/19 to change CheapOair discount from 15% to $15.

I thought about writing about more cuts that were announced by Frontier, Northwest, and Delta, but really, aren’t you getting tired of this? Click the links above if your answer is “no.” Otherwise, keep reading for a little bit of escapism to end the week.

It’s been a long time since I wrote a book report. I mean, throughout school it usually meant finding a way to write paper after paper on books that absolutely drove me insane. It’s safe to say that I haven’t fully recovered from “Ethan Frome.” Of course, this time around it’s a different story. I’m writing about a book about airplanes, well mostly about airplanes, so that’s a good start. This time, I’m writing about “Ruinar: How to be Treated Like Shite in 15 Different Countries . . . and Still Quite Like It.”

The title had me interested right away. That and the pretty airplane on the cover. So when the author offered to send me a copy, I was more than happy to dive in. It arrived and the first thing that caught my eye was the big red sticker on the front saying, “Only €0.01* - *price excludes fees and charges of €12.98 (full price €12.99)” I love it. The author clearly knows Ryanair well.

So what did I think? It was a fun read without question, but there were a couple of things that seemed to be thrown in just to fill up space and other parts that didn’t seem to fit at all. Overall, it’s a worthwhile read if you’re looking for something light (mostly) with a dry and witty humor.

The premise was simple enough. The author had a bad flight on Ryanair back in the day, and he paid €300 for the privilege. So, he decided to try to fly to every single country in the EU with a couple others thrown in (not counting recent Eastern Europe additions) for the same price and tell his story. You might think (and hope) that the book would focus more on his flying experience, but it seems to be more of a hybrid. While he talks about the flights, he spends an equal or greater amount of time talking about his experiences in the countries themselves. In those chapters that focus on his flying and traveling experiences, the book works quite well.

Possibly the only thing that really bothered me was the intentional misspelling of airline names (Ruinair, EZjet, etc) throughout the book. I’m not quite sure why he had to do it, maybe he was afraid of a lawsuit or maybe there are some funky EU laws that made him change them, but it seemed rather odd to me. He also seems to be a little dusty on his facts sometimes, especially regarding Southwest Airlines. He mentions that Southwest requires you to pay for food and drink (uh, no) and that Southwest doesn’t compete with other airlines, just train transportation. Sounds to me like he picked up a book about Southwest from 1985 and has missed the fairly significant changes since then.

But those are nits, because they are not central to the book. The author’s snarky and dry sense of humor worked well. (”In the recently upgraded Galleria lounge a glorious Bentley GT is parked centre stage. . . . ‘Would you like a car like this?’ he asks. Talk about asking a bleeding obvious question. It’s £200,000 plus. ‘Nah, I already have one.’”)

And yes, it even works when he’s taking his potshots at Americans. For example, “Only 20 per cent of Americans possess passports so we must be grateful for small mercies . . . .” Oh but don’t worry, he’s an equal opportunity insulter. “Greeks are dark, short, stocky, squat and hirsute. And that’s the ladies.”

A warning for those of you like me who are not very familiar with Irish pop culture: he has plenty of references that leave me running to Google to figure out what he’s saying. “Much like the duck at Fawlty Towers I suspect one can have tripe with orange sauce, tripe with cherry sauce, or tripe surprise.” Now, I’ve heard of Fawlty Towers, but that’s about as far as my knowledge goes. Jokes like this are completely lost on me, but it’s easy to read beyond them.

As I said, when he’s writing the chapters on his country trips, it’s really a fun read. Yes, there are some helpful travel tips, “Never eat in a restaurant with a multilingual menu. Never eat in a restaurant with pictures of the food on the place mats. . . .” I couldn’t agree more. He also apparently shares my love of Mars bars (the European kind without nuts, not the second class US version), but there are a couple of times he strays into oddly serious territory. His chapter on the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the horrors of the holocaust seemed out of place with its humorless (obviously) and dark tone. It didn’t belong in this book.

Toward the end, it seemed like the author had a set number of pages to fill but ran out of content. There are a good 25 pages of material copied straight from the internet. Online reviews of the airline at Skytrax, a note from the PPrune board, and an excruciatingly-painful description of a video on YouTube left me skipping further to find more of what I couldn’t find for free online.

In the end, I enjoyed the read. The author certainly has a love-hate relationship with Ryanair, and it’s one that I think many people feel all over Europe. The airline will get you there cheaply and mostly on-time, but when things go wrong, it can be an ugly experience if you’re not prepared for it. It’s worth picking up a copy.

Stay with me here. Michael O’Leary, Ryanair’s fearless leader and king of publicity, has announced his plans for a transatlantic airline. And yes, it will apparently include blowjobs.

His plan? A bunch of economy class seats that will sell for 10 euros or something really cheap like that as well as a business class that’ll run you 4,000 to 5,000 euros. Why would you pay that much? “Beds and blowjobs.” Now THAT’s a value proposition. Don’t believe me? Watch for yourself (sorry, but the video is blowjob free):

I’m actually surprised that he gets that you need to have a premium cabin to make this work, but it’s his spin on the product that makes this blogworthy. Will it happen? Probably not, but he’ll get all kinds of people to write about it. Heck who knows if he’ll ever get this thing off the ground at all, but who cares? Just watching his translator squirm is worth the post.

Looks like Ryanair’s upgrade went well, and the site even came back up a day early. When I read through the page describing the benefits of the upgrade, one thing stood out.

You can now check-in for your flight online up to 5 days in advance of travel. If both your flights happen to be within 5 days, you can check in for both of them. Interesting.

It used to be that if you had checked in for a flight with most airlines, you were somewhere in the airport. Gate agents could be pretty sure that if they showed a certain number of people checked-in, they could expect them to show up, unless they were on a delayed connecting flight. Even then, it was easy for the agents to predict how things would go. That was really helpful on oversold flights.

But then people started having the ability to check in from home. All of a sudden, people could show up as checked-in, but they could have been stuck in traffic or had a last minute change of plans so there was a better chance they wouldn’t show up. It made it harder to predict how full an aircraft would be.

Now, you can check yourself in 5 days prior to your flight. Imagine all the things could happen in that time? Yet now, people will check in 5 days in advance on Ryanair, because it’s still first come, first serve seating. So, even if you think your plans might change, you’re not going to take a chance that you get stuck with a late boarding number. So they can expect even less certainty.

This makes me think. What’s the point of having you check in at all?

If you need to book a ticket, change your ticket, or view your reservation on Ryanair in the next few days, you better hurry up. Starting tonight (Friday, Feb 22) at 10pm GMT (11pm on the Continent), Ryanair will completely shut down its booking engine while it upgrades it. The site won’t come back up until Monday, Feb 25 at 11p GMT. During that time, you won’t be able to:

• Make a booking online
• Make any changes to an existing booking online
• Review your flight itinerary online
• Check-in online for any flight (fees will be waived to check-in at the airport)
• Get any information from Ryanair - they’re shutting down their call centers the whole time

I have to say, I can’t remember ever seeing a system upgrade go like this before. Knowing Ryanair, this was probably the cheapest way to do the upgrade, so they signed on to just shut everything down. Hopefully when it comes back up, they’ll have better luck than other airlines who have recently tried to upgrade. Keep your fingers crossed, and if you’re traveling this weekend, get there earlier than normal to deal with the long lines that are likely to occur.

I downloaded Bing on the first day it came out hoping to see some of the great deals they were promising. I mean, if they already offer GBP .01 deals, how could it get any better?

Since I don’t live in Europe, I picked London/Stansted as my city of choice since I figured that would have plenty of deals rolling through. So far, I haven’t seen one. Not a single alert has come through.

Now to be fair, I don’t log on until about 730a or 8a in the morning so that’s 330p or 4p London time. If they’re only doing these in the morning, I’ll never see them. But are there actually any deals being pushed through Bing yet?

If anyone has seen some actual deals, let me know if the comments below.

I’m guessing that most of you who read this blog know about Southwest’s “Ding!” application. In short, you download a program that stays open on your computer. If you’re connected to the internet, you will receive an alert when Southwest publishes special sale fares. These can sometimes be up for only a couple of hours, and you’ll only be able to access them by clicking on a link in the application. The last couple of weeks, Southwest has made a splash with a lot of $25 to $50 one way fares throughout the US and you could only find them on Ding!.

It’s a great program because it enables Southwest to keep in constant contact with its customers. If they keep it up with compelling content, they have a very captive audience that acts like Pavlov’s dog any time they hear the ding alert. So it was only a matter of time before others followed the same strategy. I just didn’t know it would be such a blatant rip-off. Behold, Ryanair’s Bing! application.

Um, yeah. It’s the one on the left, looking eerily similar to Ding! over on the right. And it works the same way too.

The application sits in your system tray (in your start bar on Windows) and then a little envelope shows up when deals arrive. Click it and it opens those windows with a link to see the deals.

It’s definitely unreal how little effort Ryanair put into this thing in terms of creativity. Nice work, Southwest, for creating a program others want to steal so badly that they can’t even be bothered to tweak it.

I believe Spirit’s transformation is now complete. Yesterday they launched what I believe is the first $0.01 sale they’ve run (it ends tonight). I know they ran a $0.05 sale, but this could be the first time they’ve tried to prove that a penny isn’t irrelevant. (Actually, it still is because you have to pay taxes, but I digress.)

So what do I mean by transformation? Well, they used to be a low cost carrier that didn’t stand out from the pack. In the last year, they’ve basically stripped everything out of the fare that they can to become an “ultra” low cost carrier. Pay for checking bags, pay for drinks, pay for just about anything beyond your seat. That’s how they can offer these $0.01 sale fares that Ryanair perfected long ago. While we’re at it, can you tell which one of these pictures is from the Spirit homepage and which is from the Ryanair homepage?

Ok, so maybe the dollar sign vs. pound sign thing is a dead giveaway, but other than that, they’re pretty similar. I hope they don’t get too comfortable down there in the basement because competition is coming. Skybus is still working on certification and should be joining them shortly.

It’s interesting to see how low cost carriers developed differently in the US versus Europe. Over here, Southwest was always considered the standard for low-frills and low fares. When compared to what Ryanair has done in Europe, Southwest looks downright pricey and opulent.

Since Ryanair has taken off, plenty of people have made an effort to bring that model over here. Allegiant has fashioned themselves in a similar way but their fares aren’t nearly as low and their route network focuses on small cities that don’t help most of the US. Skybus has announced its intention to bring the model to the US, but they are still in the process of getting started. It appears that Spirit is now going to be the first to give this model a real shot here in the US.

The basic idea is to offer very low fares just to get people on the plane and then charge them extra for every little thing they’d like above and beyond basic transportation. Spirit has definitely been heading this way for some time - you’ve seen fares as low as a nickel popping up for a few months now. Today, they’ve decided to take the next step to becoming what they call an “Ultra Low Cost Carrier.” This all begins today for travel starting June 20.

First off, they’re killing their premium cabin, Spirit Plus. Instead of taking the seats off the plane, they’re just renaming them the “Big Front Seat.” The service will be exactly the same, but you can pay more just to get a bigger seat. Looking at random dates in the middle of July, a one way from Los Angeles to Ft Lauderdale is $124 in what they now call “Deluxe Leather” (also known as “Coach” in non-marketing, normal person language). The Big Front Seat is going for $544. I can’t imagine anyone is going to pay that much more simply for a larger seat, so I imagine they’ll have to reevaluate their pricing soon.

They don’t offer too many details in their press release, but the South Florida Sun-Sentinel seems to have the scoop. They say that you will be allowed one carry on bag for free and that’s it. All checked baggage will now cost you. It’s $10 a bag for the first two and then $100 a bag beyond that. By June, you’ll be able to pay online for your checked bag and then it’ll only cost $5 per bag for the first two.

And yes, even beverages won’t be free anymore. Soft drinks will now cost $1 and snacks will remain $2 to $4. To round things out, there is also a plan to make money from hotels, car rentals, event tickets, airport parking, and all that stuff.

Personally, I don’t mind this model at all as long as I can pay for what I want up front. I hate the idea of having to carry around a bunch of cash to pay for a drink, a checked bag, etc. If they can integrate all of these things into the booking process, it may work, but it’s still a tough adjustment for people used to the Southwest model. Trying this in the Caribbean where it’s a lot of leisure travel might actually pan out for them.