Cathay Pacific Flies Straight Into the Turbulence of a Multipolar World By our correspondent in the airport lounge where optimism goes to die Hong Kong—On paper, Cathay Pacific is just another airline trying to coax human cargo into ever-smaller seats while its accountants figure out how to charge for oxygen. In practice, the 77-year-old carrier…
EasyJet and the Great Orange Descent: How a Budget Airline Became a Global Mood Ring By Our Man in the Departure Lounge It is 06:47 at Gatwick, and the queue for EasyJet flight EZY9001 to Dubrovnik already resembles a UN refugee camp sponsored by Pret A Manger. The passengers—German backpackers, French retirees, a Ghanaian wedding…
Luton Airport: The Tiny Terminal That Could (and Probably Shouldn’t) Luton, Bedfordshire – Just 30 miles north of London, a modest ribbon of tarmac sprouts from a landscape best described as “aggressively beige.” This is London Luton Airport, the budget airline’s answer to the question, “How cheaply can we simulate international travel while still charging…
Frontier Airlines: The Spirit of the American West, Now Available in a Middle Seat Near You By: Our Man in the Departure Lounge DENVER—Somewhere over the North Atlantic, a Lufthansa A350 glides toward Frankfurt like a well-funded social-democracy, sipping fuel and serving Riesling. Ten thousand feet below, an Airbus A320 with a raccoon on the…
Somewhere above the North Atlantic, a Boeing 787 is banking left in a holding pattern because the airline just realized it’s short one rivet certified for 0.0003 millimeters of tolerance. Down on the ground, the same missing rivet is making traders in London, Tokyo, and São Paulo twitch like overcaffeinated meerkats. Welcome to the global…
Thunderbirds, or as most of the planet now calls them, “the flying ambulance that lands on your Instagram feed,” have become the rare military export that nobody minds receiving. Picture a scarlet jet screaming over a refugee camp in Jordan, dropping nothing more lethal than colored smoke and a promise that someone, somewhere, still has…
Cruising Altitude, Crashing Expectations: The Global Irony of the Humble “Plane” By the time you finish this sentence, roughly 1,200 commercial aircraft will be aloft, herding 1.5 million souls above weather systems, war zones, and the occasional rogue balloon. From Reykjavík to Riyadh, the aluminum tube—once a miracle, now a flying bus—has become the most…
DOHA, Qatar – Somewhere between the perfume fog of Duty Free and the existential dread of Gate C-23, Hamad International Airport has quietly become the planet’s most polite choke-point. Every minute, 750 souls—fresh from Bangkok, Boston, or Bamako—shuffle through this $16-billion marble lung, clutching boarding passes like indulgences sold by a particularly efficient pope. They…
VIENNA, AUSTRIA — In a week when the planet is busy arguing over whose oligarchs are more photogenic, the death of Andreas Nikolaus “Niki” Lauda at 70 has reminded a distracted globe that there once existed men who took genuine risks for something as quaint as “going faster than the other guy.” The three-time Formula…
