Working for an airline company, not only offers you the chance to travel if you are keen on traveling, but it may also provide a decent living in time. As built into each contract, flight attendants receive $1,000 annual pay raises, as they grow older and gather more experience. This means that one’s salary may jump from the starting wage of $17,000 a year to over $30,000 per year in 12 years.

A junior flight attendant will usually start with a wage of $19 per hour, or in some case less, around $14 a hour. These figures may vary a little depending on every airline, but generally flight attendants are given a minimum of 75 to 80 hours per month. Like in most cases, the bigger the airline the higher the pay. So you can expect to start out a few dollars higher for getting hired at a major airline like American, United and Delta, etc. over some regional airlines such as Comair, ASA, American Eagle, and etc. Still, there is always a way to increase your income, if you choose night shifts, to work during some weekends, holidays or even fly international flights.

Very important, flight attendants are never paid this hourly rate for every hour that they work! The time spent commuting to the airport, sleeping in hotel rooms, standing around the airport between flights, and assisting passengers during boarding and deplaning is basically unpaid labor. Most airlines only pay from the time an aircraft pushes back from the gate to the time it arrives at the gate of its destination. This is commonly referred to as flight time, block time, or hard time. The major exception to this is meal expenses. Most airlines pay a nominal hourly rate to cover meal expenses, while hotel lodging is paid for by the airline.

Other bonuses include: flight discounts of up to 90% for you as an employee and even for your family. You should also know that different companies offer buddy passes, especially designed to cut flying cost for your friends.

So, if you ever wondered of becoming a flight attendant, you should know that the major requirements for becoming a flight attendant are standard: not too tall or short, friendly and only a high school diploma. Once you are selected, the airline hiring you will provide with specific training between 3 to 6 weeks. Also, job performance has virtually no impact on your pay. As a flight attendant you are expected to work at a high level and will never receive a promotion of any kind, even for exemplary service.

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When Lufthansa bought earlier this year BMI Airline, they didn’t take into account that the company may be facing such major problems. The airline has a permanent of 4,500 workforce and it’s fighting to survive since is forced to shutdown seven services operating out of Europe and nine aircraft from its fleet of 39 planes.

Flights from Heathrow to Brussels, Tel Aviv, Kiev and Aleppo will be suspended in January. The service from Heathrow to Amsterdam will be also suspended in March 2010. Seasonal services from Heathrow to Palma and Venice will not be reinstated next summer. BMI will continue to offer services from London to Brussels through an arrangement made possible with Brussels Airlines.

Airline analysts believe it could lose as much as £200m this year.

It’s pretty much obvious, that at least for now, BMI has postponed its plans of expanding and entering more markets, blaming the economic slowdown for its problems.

BMI is the second largest airline at London Heathrow, one of the world’s busiest and best-connected international airports. From the Heathrow hub BMI operates services in the UK, Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. Former known as British Midland, it was rebranded bmi British Midland in 2001, which was subsequently shortened to bmi two years later. In 2002, bmibaby, a low-cost subsidiary with its own unique brand, was launched.

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One good example of an airline company using twitter is American Airlines. Its young, dynamic and rather open online approach is amazing, coming from a company who was just in the newspapers in an affray about firing its employee for his transparency. As you might recall we are talking about the situation created by Dusting Curtis, when he decided to complain to the company about their poor website. Mr. X, former employee wrote back to him and then allegedly got fired for this. So what is the airline afraid of so much to forget that people need to see the kitchen, before they start eating your food? After all, I’m guessing not all questions on twitter are about the company’s flights and schedules.

Next, I could go on with some recent examples of obvious bad customer service, in order to refresh your memory. The most popular one is for sure United Airlines versus singer/songwriter Dave Carroll. The latter tried to convince the company to pay him $1200 for damages to his guitar. Even though the owner was quick to complain and had witness supporting him, justice seemed not to be on his side. After eight months the artist desperately recorded a song called “United Breaks Guitars” and posted the video on YouTube.

What happened next? The story was soon called one of “the best online reputation attack” since the original video is still gathering views worldwide and, most importantly, made the company realize that it was mistaking and should have solved the problem before.

Also do you have anything bad to say about Ryanair? Of course they are low cost, but the real question is how low are they? Going way back, Ryanair shocked its customers at the beginning of 2009 when not only officials admitted that one employee was harassing and verbally abusing a person on his blog, but continued to add the list of insults. It may be just me, but I find it hard to imagine how I can trust in someone that has the impression of being professional and still testifies this:

Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again….Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel.

It’s quite clear that Ryanair doesn’t have much time for social media and that it doesn’t really understand how free the internet really works. Maybe next time, when purchasing a ticket, we should try and see beyond the nice and smiling faces that welcome us aboard.

If you are a victim of some sort of airline abuse or you think an airline company did something terrible wrong to you, feel free to comment here and tell us all about.

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The task is to build more than 1,710 new planes in value of $300 billion, since during this period the passenger traffic is also expected to increase with 4.9 % each year. This growth is due to several statistics showing that markets and people’s incomes will rise in the Middle East over the next years, as well as in India and China.

We see tremendous growth for the Middle East region, and Middle East carriers are well-positioned to meet those growth requirements with the fleet capacity they have in the form of unfilled orders, or backlog, said Randy Tinseth, vice president of Marketing, Boeing Commercial Airplanes, during the Dubai Air Show.

Other top plane makers like Airbus said that the airline industry will probably revive by the next year. This way there are high hopes that airline companies will start making new big money from the beginning of 2011 after serious efforts will be done to straighten up the global economy. Airbus is back on track, managing to sign a deal with Yemenia Airways for 10 A320 aircraft valued for $700 million at list prices, while other jets are still pending.

The Middle East carriers, that would benefit from this investment, will surely include the UAE’s Emirates, the Arab world’s biggest airline. Also further figures show that the Middle East and Asia Pacific air travel market will speed up with 6.3 percent from 2008 to 2028. The passenger and his/her choosing will determine the success of airlines in the area, but companies must meet people’s requirements. Thus, by promoting more flight choices, lower fares and direct access to a wider range of destinations, companies might get the benefit. This way, it’s not the size of the plane that matters, but the number of flights in the area with more efficient airplanes.

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This is the case of Dustin Curtis, an User Experience (UX) designer who happens to be traveling very often. He recently tried to book a flight at AA.com, the American Airlines website. Unfortunately he seemed very bothered by the company’s approach and layout and vowed never to request for their services ever again. Before doing so he wrote a blog post, that began with Dear American Airlines proposing a different and a more customer-friendly design for the company’s website.

To his surprise, Curtis soon received a reply from an UX architect, representing aa.com, further addressed as Mr. X. The AA employee tried to explain why in large organizations things move rather slowly and that there are regulations to obey by.

The group running AA.com consists of at least 200 people spread out amongst many different groups, including, for example, QA, product planning, business analysis, code development, site operations, project planning, and user experience. We have a lot of people touching the site, and a lot more with their own vested interests in how the site presents its content and functionality. Fortunately, much of the public-facing functionality is funneled through UX, so any new features you see on the site should have been vetted through and designed by us before going public.

However, there are large exceptions. For example, our Interactive Marketing group designs and implements fare sales and specials (and doesn’t go through us to do it), and the Publishing group pushes content without much interaction with us… Oh, and don’t forget the AAdvantage team (which for some reason, runs its own little corner of the site) or the international sites (which have a lot of autonomy in how their domains are run)… Anyway, I guess what I’m saying is that AA.com is a huge corporate undertaking with a lot of tentacles that reach into a lot of interests. It’s not small, by any means.

One rule that Mr. X seemed to have forgotten is never to reveal job related information outside the workspace, thus violating a non-disclosure agreement. Some might say that X actually defended the work process of corporations as opposed to smaller shops, but by presenting how the process works and detailing how the update of the aa.com website cannot be done over night, he exposed a lot of confidential data to any third party like Dustin Curtis and after publishing, to the general public.

As he ends his letter in fear he might get fired, we wonder if this wasn’t his actual wish. Last week, Curtis announced that the employee was promptly fired after AA searched its Exchange database for the text of the anonymized email he had published and identified the employee who wrote it.

For it may be clear to some why Mr.X got fired, we should also highlight that more diplomatic measures are preferred, especially in the case of big companies like American Airlines. By shutting out from the public like this, there is always a risk of damaging the company’s connection with the people they serve. And if a company’s employees are firewalled off from the public, the company will eventually lose sight of what the public wants.

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Those who booked on flights operated by Delta Airlines, Northwest Airlines or Delta Connection, from or through the following Gulf Coast cities: Fort Walton Beach, Florida; Gulfport-Biloxi, Mississippi; Mobile, Alabama; and Panama City, Pensacola, Tallahassee, Florida; starting from Tuesday, Nov. 10, are allowed to make a one-time change to their travel schedule, free of charge, if tickets are changed before Nov. 11, 2009.

Delta stated that will try take all the necessary measures to help, even thinning flight schedules to and from affected airports to ensure delays are minimized during the storm caused by Hurricane Ida. However, customers should know that they are given the possibility to reconsider their flights in the Gulf Coast area, options being postponing or rerouting their trip without penalty.

Hurricane Ida is the ninth tropical storm and third hurricane of the 2009 Atlantic hurricane season. Ida developed shortly after November 4 as a tropical depression. In the United States, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal declared a state of emergency due to the forecasted hurricane conditions.

All travels for changed itineraries must begin by Nov. 11 and any fare difference between the original ticket and the new ticket will be collected at the time of rebooking. If your flight has been canceled, you can always request refunds. Complete details are available at delta.com and nwa.com.

Also, in case you are traveling from or through impacted Gulf Coast cities in the next few weeks, please consider visiting the following websites: delta.com or nwa.com, in order to check the status of the flights before arriving at the airport to avoid possible inconvenience. Updates on flights also are available by calling 1-800-325-1999 (Delta) or 1-800-441-1818 (Northwest).

Delta Airlines is the world’s largest airline. From its hubs in Atlanta, Cincinnati, Detroit, Memphis, Minneapolis-St. Paul, New York-JFK, Salt Lake City, Amsterdam and Tokyo-Narita, Delta, its Northwest subsidiary and Delta Connection carriers offer service to 368 destinations in 66 countries and serve more than 170 million passengers each year.

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It wasn’t long until the suspect visited the same airport again and grabbed another baggage. This time the police followed him home and with a search warrant discovered no less than 1,000 missing luggages. The man appears to had been stealing them one by one and then took out what thought was of value and could use.

It’s a God awful lot of luggage, you can’t even imagine, Phoenix police spokesman Detective James Holmes said.

Often times, when a passenger reports their bag missing, an airline will reimburse the passenger for the contents of the bag. According to an airline customer service agent, airlines can provide a passenger with up to $3,000 per bag for the contents inside.

The police also said that interviews with neighbors revealed that the couple often organized yard sales in order to profit from a variety of the stolen goods, including the suitcases themselves. Records search revealed the Kings had filed for bankruptcy in 2005. Their Waddell house is currently owned by Bayview Loan Servicing LLC and was sold to that organization on August 24, 2009.

Both spouses are now facing a multitude of charges such as theft and burglary, while authorities are now trying to identify “massive amounts of stolen items” in an attempt to reunite them with their owners.

This is no longer a Phoenix state matter, since the police said the investigation could become international.

If you believe you might be a victim call 602-495-7808.

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JAL said last week it would ask for aid from a state-backed turnaround fund. It could receive a large injection of public money from the fund if it can secure the backing of creditors and come up with a viable restructuring plan.

These proposals have triggered strong opposition from retirees and employees, who under current laws can easily block any cuts to their benefits if just one third of them vote against.

To get around this, the government is considering legislation that would allow JAL to cut payouts, but implementation would be tricky as it could be interpreted as violating a constitutional protection of personal property rights.

A bankruptcy would likely cause more pain for creditors, which include the state-owned Development Bank of Japan and the country’s top three private banks. The task force has estimated creditors could recover just 2-3 percent of their loans in bankruptcy, as opposed to 20-30 percent if the restructuring were out of court.

Five years after retiring from Japan Airlines, former pilot Tsutomu Watanabe is fighting to protect the pension he was promised but that the airline can no longer afford to pay.

My pension contract is settled and I have my certificate, said the 65-year old Watanabe.

A website set up by Watanabe and other JAL retirees shows that more than 40 percent of 9,000 people receiving and in line to receive benefits have signed an online petition against pension cuts, which puts them above the one-third threshold.

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More and more people everywhere use iPhones and those who for some reason are scared of flying are not few either. A spokesman from Mental Workout, a company developing software to help people solve issues and increase mental performance, said an estimated one in every three adults were scared of flying.

The iPhone application was developed by the airline together with Mental Workout and has shown, based on the customer’s feedback, that the program has a success rate of over 98 percent.

This is Virgin Atlantic innovation at its best. Our first iPhone app will bring the benefits of our successful Flying Without Fear course to millions of people around the world who are now using mobile technology to make their lives better. The app will put many travelers at ease and enable them to prepare for their first Virgin Atlantic flight, stated Richard Branson, President of Virgin Atlantic.

The course starts with a personal introduction by Sir Richard Branson, followed by a video-based in-flight explanation and customized program to prepare you for future flights. Together with a fear attack button in case of emergencies you get 2,000 bonus points when joining Flying Club.

Virgin Atlantic’s Flying Without Fear team recently helped American actress Whoopi Goldberg overcome her fear of flying. The actress had not flown for a decade but a business commitment in London meant she had to step on a plane once again. After going through the course, Whoopi Goldberg said:

I was a sceptic. I hadn’t flown in 13 years but after doing their program, I understood that while my fear was real, there were many things I didn’t know or had misinformation about, which they were able to clear up. So what happened? The program works. I now fly. It’s that simple.

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