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Liz Owen needed help, and she needed it fast.

She had rescheduled a flight from Washington to Los Angeles on Virgin America to avoid superstorm Sandy, which was about to slam into the East Coast. But she’d forgotten to order a wheelchair.

Owen, who works for a nonprofit organization in Washington, had recently broken her foot, which was in a cast. “I had been on the phone on hold with Virgin America for well over an hour,” she remembers. Halfway to the airport, she decided to send Virgin America a tweet — a message on the microblogging service Twitter.
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9 comments

Are airlines responsible for America’s TSA disaster?

One of the more interesting reactions to last week’s post arguing that the TSA as we know it is dead came from a publicist for one of the airline trade associations.

In a polite but insistent email, he claimed I’d misunderstood the congressional testimony by one of his executives. The airline industry rep was criticizing government regulations — not the TSA — for being expensive, inconsistent, and reactive, he said.

It made me wonder: Why would airlines not want to be seen as criticizing the TSA? Everyone else is.
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30 comments

Someone urinated on my airline seat — is this enough compensation?

Anything can happen on a plane. Anything did happen to Rita Auth when she boarded a recent flight from Dallas to Tucson.

“The previous passenger had urinated on my assigned seat and the crew failed to notice it,” she says. “I found out by sitting down and feeling the moisture on my pants.”

I’m not writing about this case for the shock value, although I’ll admit there is some. I’m not even going to mention the name of the airline (not too hard to guess) because I think every airline would have handled this one in exactly the same way.
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73 comments

The 6 best airlines of 2013

In the competition for the best airline of 2013, the real fight was for third place.

Southwest Airlines pulled into the lead the moment the finalists were announced on Tuesday morning. JetBlue Airways held a comfortable second place. But third place was a real horserace, with American, United and Frontier Airlines fighting fighting for it until the poll closed.
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