Coronavirus has cut US air travel to a fraction of what it was, with COVID-19 guidelines including stay-at-home orders reducing flyers to a bare trickle, the TSA has confirmed. With many US states on lockdown by governor order, and the general advice being to maintain social distance and avoid unnecessary travel, the knock-on impact to how many people are passing through airports has been huge.
The Real ID deadline has been pushed back, giving travelers a temporary reprieve from having to swap their driver's licenses and state ID cards in order to fly. Though it promises to bring more security to forms of identification used by airlines to allow passengers onto planes, Real ID has been criticized for confusing travelers and forcing them to visit the DMV in order to apply for the upgraded cards.
Today Delta CEO Ed Bastian sent an internal letter with a list of actions that'll be taken to "protect the financial position of the company". This set of actions includes an "overall capacity reduction in the next few months of 40 percent - the largest capacity reduction in Delta's history, including 2001." While the company will maintain service to London, England, they're also complying with the 30-day ban on travel to and from continental Europe announced the night of March 12th (Wednesday).
A special limited time experience is appearing at Hotel X Toronto in March in which the "Nintendo Switch Suite" is made available. Hotel X Toronto's teamed up with Nintendo of Canada to benefit Starlight Children's Foundation with proceeds from a transformed Presidential Suite. The suite is designed "for social gaming with friends" and will cost guests approximately $500 per night.
There are a lot of factors to consider when your ultimate packing goal is to only travel with one bag. Do you opt for one with wheels, go fashionably hand-carried, or pick a backpack? Over the years I've developed a preference for the latter, and lucky for me there has been a big surge of backpacks over the past couple of years. The options range from startups through to the likes of Tumi, Nomatic, Wandrd, and Boundary Supply, and you'd be forgiven for finding it all overwhelming.
Aggressive controls around travel and CDC testing have been successful so far in keeping coronavirus cases in the US minimal, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said today, though experts there warned that community spread of COVID-19 is "very possible - even likely" in America. The update comes as the US Department of State repatriated 329 citizens on chartered flights from the Diamond Princess cruise ship.
For years, American drivers have looked on enviously at their European counterparts driving pop-up camper vans, but now Mercedes is sharing the love. Unveiled at the Chicago Auto Show 2020 today, the 2020 Mercedes-Benz Weekender is a pop-up camper based on the Metris van but revamped for road trips.
It may have been its best-selling model but the 737 Max could now become the plane that destroys Boeing. The plane has been grounded for almost a year now and it seems it will take more than a year before it can spread its wings again. But even if it finally gets the green light, Boeing might have some trouble restarting its pipelines now that it has put the production of the problematic plane on hold.
Much of the focus on lunar space travel is spent on getting to the moon because, of course, we need to get there and establish a base first before anything else. But once we've settled down, how are we going to get around our new lunar home? That's the question that Lexus has sought to answer with a set of concept design sketches that are figuratively and literally out of this world. Some of them we'd probably wished wasn't so out of reach.
By now, SpaceX is quite famous for launching rockets that land safely back on earth to be reused again. Last Sunday, however, it let a Falcon 9 rocket explode and actually got congratulated for it. That's really because the expensive rocket wasn't the focus of the launch. Instead, SpaceX was testing the Crew Dragon's escape system that could hopefully save even more precious lives when the capsule does make its first manned flight in a few months.
A man decided to play a video game on a monitor at an airport in Portland yesterday, January 16, 2020. This was not a particularly forward-thinking idea, given the forever-volatile nature of airports in general here in the USA for the past couple of decades. But he did it anyway. He decided that his best course of action for staving off boredom at the airport at 4:40 AM was to "hijack" an official airport TV screen.
Boeing is already under a lot of heat for technical problems with its beleaguered 737 Max plane and the last thing it needs is a PR disaster caused by its own ranks. Unfortunately for the company, that is exactly the case thanks to documents coming from Boeing itself as part of its required disclosure about the design and development of the plane. Suffice it to say, some people inside the company knew exactly about the problems that would tragically cost 346 lives later on.