3 Links I Love: An Big Loss at Emirates, Eastern Wants Growth, Photos Aplenty

This week’s featured link

An Executive’s Retirement Signals the End of a Golden Era at Emirates – Skift
Emirates CEO Sir Tim Clark has announced he’s retiring, and Brian Sumers takes a retrospective look at his time at the helm. There’s no question he has been a force in this industry, and he deserves a place in the airline CEO hall of fame (if that were a thing). It will be particularly interesting to see what an Emirates with someone else steering the ship looks like.

A Delta 767 over Greenland seen from a passing Swiss 777. https://t.co/EloFPZ9PB3 © Severin H. pic.twitter.com/yXTbOFXjzw
— JetPhotos (@JetPhotos) December 29, 2019

Image of the Week: If you need some good airplane porn, the JetPhotos Twitter account is always good for a quick fix. But this one… that is just a spectacular shot.

Two for the road

Eastern Airlines applies to start scheduled int’l ops – ch-aviation
Looks like Eastern has bigger plans for flying scheduled service than what it flies today. That’ll be… interesting. Though I don’t know its plans, I’ll save a place on the Airlines We Lost 2020 list just in case.

My Top 10 Pictures from 2019! – Andy’s Travel Blog
Andy rounds up his favorite photos of 2019, and number two is a stunner. (No, this isn’t clickbait. It’s a fantastic shot of an MD-80 cockpit.) Number 10, the overhead shot of DFW, ain’t too shabby either.

Brett

10 responses to “3 Links I Love: An Big Loss at Emirates, Eastern Wants Growth, Photos Aplenty”

Kilroy

Jan 3, 2020

Love that top-down DFW photo. I’m surprised that I haven’t seen a coffee table sized book showing gorgeous photos of airports and airport architecture… Something along those lines would definitely make for a great gift for avgeeks, as would a simple book with photos of cockpits (such as the photo of the Mad Dog).

Reply
1. Alex
  
  Jan 3, 2020
  
  Google’s “Earth View” Chrome extension shows an image like that every time you open a new tab: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/earth-view-from-google-ea/bhloflhklmhfpedakmangadcdofhnnoh
  
  Highly recommended – lots of cool photos of airports, ports, and river deltas. It’s fun to try to determine the specific place you’re looking at before you look at the label in the lower right.
  
  Reply
Fred

Jan 3, 2020

Cranky – Perhaps you should do an Airline CEO Hall of Fame.

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1. Kilroy
  
  Jan 3, 2020
  
  This actually wouldn’t be a bad idea for a series of blog posts. Someone could do a post per person on some of the most influential figures in the airline world (past and/or present), with an analysis of that person’s legacy and how it continues to affect things today.
  
  I know Cranky usually doesn’t do much a ton of posts on airline-related history, but this would be a good series for **someone** to do (if not Cranky than someone else), and the posts would be pretty timeless and that would make for good filler material when the author is on vacation.
  
  Reply
Yo

Jan 3, 2020

Can I amend my predictions to include Eastern as another airline that will be in the grave yard this year?

BTW, cool pic, I flew over Greenland once and had a similar view of a SwissAir MD11 for over an hour, just beautiful!

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1. southbay flier
  
  Jan 3, 2020
  
  I still can’t figure out why on earth anyone would ever want to resurrect the Eastern Airlines name? To me, it was associated with labor strife and surly service. Not exactly nostalgia.
  
  Reply
jxshannon2

Jan 3, 2020

Just the usual minor bitch about cost cutting. My wife and I just flew United from Dulles to LAX. It was a 737-700 or 800. We bought econo, but didn’t pay extra to choose seats. We were lucky to get econo-plus seats. The interior looked like it was from long ago. None of the seats would recline (though the arms did have recline buttons that would not budge). I realize seats in the escape rows have to stay up, but I toured up and down and no one was reclined. People were flopped forward on their trays to sleep. There was no entertainment system at all. They offered an ap, on which you could pay for whatever, and I noticed over my shoulder that an hour of wifi was something like $16.95. I don’t know how much movies were. Since it was the holidays, a steward did smile and offer me a free scotch. Sigh. Air travel used to be fun. Dogpatch Air isn’t.

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1. Oliver
  
  Jan 3, 2020
  
  Steward? It’s 2020, not 1920 :)
  
  You don’t need to pay for Wifi to use the free streaming inflight entertainment service.
  
  http://unitedprivatescreening.com/personaldevices
  
  Pretty sure seats on United generally recline.
  
  Reply
  1. jxshannon2
    
    Jan 3, 2020
    
    Sure, thanks. What’s he called now? Flight Attendant? He was very helpful. I didn’t mean any disrespect at all. And I bet we had a soon-to-be mothballed plane. Nothing reclined that I saw. I have no personal experience of using the entertainment app. I’m such a curmudgeon that I use a flip-phone. Almost nobody on the plane even tried to use it, as far as I could see on a long walk back to get another (free) scotch. It was all 1990ish–books, magazines, and mostly snoozing (early afternoon). Sorry, I’m just reporting here, perhaps badly.
    
    Reply
    1. Oliver
      
      Jan 3, 2020
      
      Yes, flight attendant is the contemporary term :)
      
      I doubt it’s an aircraft at risk of retirement any time soon. If it’s a 737-800/900 without DirecTV screens, it’s probably one of the newer ones.
      
      Regarding recline, perhaps a load of polite people? I generally don’t recline unless it’s a red eye/evening/very early morning flight. And I find the same is usually true for people around me.
      
      Reply