3 Links I Love: Credit Card Declines, Mobile Moves, Israel’s New Plane

Aug 7, 2020

More Reading on This Topic: Links I Love

This week’s featured link

Travel Blogs Rode Credit Card Referrals Wave: What Comes Next? – Skift
It may be a day of reckoning for credit card bloggers. The olden times of easy, big money are — at the very least — temporarily gone. Will they come back?

*Image of the Week*: I found an old overhead view of the Atlanta airport from 1972. I put that on top of today’s footprint. At the top, you can see the old terminal which sits on top of what is now the northernmost runway and Delta’s headquarters. The big empty space in the middle is where the current terminals are.

Two for the road

Mobile to shift commercial airline flights to more convenient downtown airport – TPG
If there’s one city that had two airports and didn’t need them, it’s Mobile. What’s even weirder is that Mobile’s airlines were serving the less convenient airport, with the exception of Frontier. Now they’ll all move to the better airport.

Netanyahu’s Controversial New ‘Air Force One’ – Haaretz
Forget about the controversy. It’s just fun to take a look at how they’ve configured a VIP plane like this.

Brett

6 responses to “3 Links I Love: Credit Card Declines, Mobile Moves, Israel’s New Plane”

Kilroy

Aug 7, 2020 at 8:00 am

Thanks for the links.

Interesting that they plan to shuttle Israel’s Air Force One from an air force base to TLV (a short, 56 mile hop) each time it is used, but it makes sense from a security standpoint.

I always wondered from the travel blogs made from credit card referrals… Up to $300 each is a lot, more than I would have imagined.

Very weird seeing ATL without its current parallel terminals and runways… Maybe I’ve flown to/from ATL a bit too much (1-2 roundtrips annually for the past 25 years or so), but I’ve always been a fan of ATL’s current design when it comes to passenger efficiency for a hub airport, as walking distances and times from gate-to-gate and curb-to-gate aren’t bad for such a big airport. It’s ground side layout, however, leaves a lot to be desired, with frequent backups on the roads leading to the terminals.

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Ron

Aug 7, 2020 at 8:57 am

I don’t believe the renderings in the Haaretz article reflect any reality. 4 across on a 767 for the press corps?! I had the chance to ride in one of the IAF VIP-configured 707s back in the early 90’s, and the back of the plane was standard coach seats, 6 across. I expect the 767 will also feature standard coach seats, but even if they installed business class seats, I would guess they would be recliner seats, so probably 6 across.

The rest of the internal configuration is also probably just an artist’s imagination. The one thing that’s certain is the bed: after all, Emperor Netanyahu has been known for paying hundreds of thousands of dollars (in taxpayer money) for installing a luxury bed in a chartered plane for a 3 or 4 hour trip to Europe. Just as a reference, the IAF 707s had bunk beds in the VIP section.

Incidentally, the historical section at the end of the article is worded a bit unclearly. Re’em is not the name of the specific plane that flew Prime Minister Begin to Egypt in 1979, but rather the codename of all IAF 707s (VIP, transport, and tankers; according to Wikipedia, IAF is one of 5 remaining military/government 707 operators worldwide). And the 2000s section about civilian charters has photos of PM Rabin from 1976 and PM Shamir from 1987, showing that civilian charters were used to supplement the IAF transports long before the latter had ceased.

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1. Oliver
  
  Aug 7, 2020 at 10:59 am
  
  The article itself also includes this blurb:
  
  “While the Boeing 767-300ER can carry up to 290 passengers, the prime minister’s plane will at most carry around half that number.”
  
  Don’t see how they would fit anywhere near 145 passengers into the configuration in the drawing. I see 44 seats if you strap two people in the bed. Maybe one more in the shower stall ;)
  
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jxshannon2

Aug 7, 2020 at 6:48 pm

Uh, how do I get to the underlying image, the airport today? Thanks.

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1. CF
  
  Aug 7, 2020 at 7:42 pm
  
  That’s just Google Maps if you want to pull it up
  
  Reply
Randy

Aug 7, 2020 at 8:58 pm

I believe the current Renaissance Concourse Hotel is also on that site, hence the name.

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