80 Years in the A

Y'all wasn't exactly expectin' a pitcher a'Mammy, wuzya?

Eighty years ago this week, Monroe, Louisiana-based Delta Air Lines began serving Atlanta Airport with one daily nonstop to Birmingham. From that skimpy hop over the state line, Delta has developed ATL into the world's largest airline hub, with nonstop flights to over 80 international destinations and who-knows-how-many domestic cities (well, Wikipedia probably knows, but...). In fact, it's because of Delta that whether you're going to Heaven or Hell, you'll have to change planes at ATL.

A large part of the reason I like Delta (theoretically, anyway) is because of its commitment to Atlanta, a Southern city that, for all its faults, has always been much more progressive than the region to which it belongs, no doubt a positive consequence of its connections to the rest of the world. Likewise, Southern culture gets exported as well, from the unrefined graciousness of the cleaning ladies in the terminal to the gleam of the TSA agent's gold tooth—my home culture, for better or worse. Oh, and there's also that Chick-fil-A in Concourse A.

You can read more about Delta and the A at the airline's blog. Meanwhile, in honor of Delta's 80th anniversary at the doubly-named Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, I leave you with Atlanna's own OutKast and their Southern Gothic classic, "Ms. Jackson," probably filmed right down US-19 from the airpert itself. For real.



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From the AV Room: Brazil in Black and White

A Brazilian airline's image of Brazilians:




A Korean airline's image of Brazilians:



Just sayin'.

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Vintage Travel Posters (VTP): Rio

This is the first of a new monthly series of eye candy at Fly Brother, imaginatively named VTP (short for Vintage Travel Posters). We'll see how travel companies and bureaus have been enticing people off the couch since international leisure travel first became a bourgeois conceit. Our first destination: the marvelous city of Rio de Janeiro, where both terrestrial and corporal landscapes have been hot commodities since the 1920s.













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Airline Geekery: Mergers and Marketing in Latin America

While the press and traveling public gawk at the news of merger of United Airlines and Continental Airlines, another move towards industry consolidation is taking place south of the border. Last month, Brazil's OceanAir (yes, in English), started a few years ago by Colombo-Brazilian multimillionaire Germán Efromovich, adopted the brand name of its much larger Colombian sister airline, Avianca, also owned by Efromovich's Synergy Group. With this re-branding, the airline hopes to move up from its position as Brazil's fifth-largest carrier, offer international flights from Brazil, and become a recognized name in the region. Avianca is following in the tradition of Chile-based LAN Airlines and Central American conglomerate Grupo TACA (with which it merged last October, forming the double-branded Avianca-TACA) in cross-border airline mergers and branding, turning national airlines into continental carriers.

El Salvador-based TACA was the first airline to jump into multinational consolidation in the early-90s by investing in the flag carriers of its neighboring countries: Aviateca of Guatemala, Lacsa of Costa Rica, and NICA of Nicaragua. Though maintaining different owners (with Lacsa retaining its airline code), the combined company created one brand identity and focused hub operations at San Salvador and San José, then later at Lima when TACA Peru signed on.

TACA's merger with Avianca, in which both airlines will continue to operate under their respective brands, is the largest of the various mergers and acquisitions that Avianca has undergone in its history as the world's second-oldest existing airline. After engulfing several smaller Colombian airlines, Avianca bought the tiny VIP in Ecuador and its new owner, Efromovich, started OceanAir in Brazil, both of which are now called Avianca in their respective countries, though they continue to function separately under local operating certificates.

LAN, the largest airline in Spanish-speaking Latin America and one of only a few anywhere that can fly you to Tahiti, works similarly; the Chilean branch and its subsidiaries LAN Peru, LAN Argentina, LAN Dominicana, and LAN Ecuador all operate with differing certificates, but unified branding. LAN also bypasses its hubs at Lima and Santiago, with nonstop flights from Miami to Bogotá, Caracas, and Punta Cana, furthering the concept of LAN as a super-national airline brand and having dropped the name LanChile years ago (they also have a thrice-weekly JFK-Toronto hop).

As the global airline industry contracts for its own survival, the major US carriers whittle themselves down to a handful of legacy (i.e. old-as-dirt) and low-cost brands, unable to merge with foreign airlines because of US legal restrictions. The major Latin American airlines, much like Air France-KLM or British Airways and Iberia, are steeling themselves for the future of air travel by offering broad networks and convenient transfers that transcend national frontiers. And now you've got three (or two?) more options for heading down Argentine way:

Avianca: Non-stops from Miami and New York-JFK to Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, and Barranquilla; Miami to Cartagena; and Fort Lauderdale, Los Angeles, and Washington-Dulles to Bogotá. Connections to all major South American cities through Bogotá.

LAN: Non-stops from Los Angeles, Miami, New York-JFK, and San Francisco to Lima; Miami and New York-JFK to Santiago; New York-JFK to Guayaquil and Toronto; Miami to Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Caracas, Punta Cana, and Quito. Connections to all major South American cities through Lima and Santiago.

TACA: Non-stops from Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York-JFK, Orlando, San Francisco, and Washington-Dulles to San Salvador, with connections to all major South American cities; Los Angeles, Miami, and New York-JFK to San José; and Chicago, Los Angeles, and Miami to Guatemala City.

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Tracking Your Trips (a.k.a. Catnip for Airline Geeks)

For airline geeks like me, or for folks interested in keeping track of their air mileage or flying habits, German-based website, FlightMemory.com, records and organizes your travel data, offering whimsical statistics and personal route maps.

After entering destination, schedule, and seating information for about 90% of the flights I've ever taken, FlightMemory calculates how many times I could have circumnavigated the Earth (8.9), my longest and shortest flights (that Seoul-LA hop was a killa), and how often I've sat in the front, middle, or back of the plane (of 224 flights, I've flown first 3 times, business 9 times, and cattle class 211 times).I also get these lovely maps, plotting my flight paths within and outside of the US (you can tell I'm an East Coast boy with Latin American tendencies), and when I decide I like the looks of things, I can order a more colorful, detailed wall map so I can brag about my travels even more than I do now.Other trivial tidbits include my top ten airports, airlines, aircraft, and routes (BOG, Delta, Boeing 737, and Bogotá-Barranquilla, respectively) based on actual flights flown, not so much personal preference.
Innit cool? Track your trips at FlightMemory.com.

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Resurrecting the Jetrosexual

Five years ago, Virgin Atlantic Airways came up with an inspired and inspiring marketing campaign as a way to put the glamour and excitement back into air travel—to spawn a new Jet Age, populated by a group of "high fliers" whose mission is "to achieve greatness" and "raise the bar in their industry or simply succeed where no one else could." These go-getters who get around were dubbed jetrosexuals. Can't get any flier than that.

Along with the designation came a list of eleven commandments to which Fly Brother tries his darnedest to adhere, and in order to advance to the level of a true jetrosexual, grasshoppers, you must not only commit these to memory (in theory, at least), but you must live by the mantras espoused here in your everyday actions as well:

11. Thou shall have thine passport ready to go at a moment’s notice.

Fly Brother says: Naturally.

10. Thou shalt have a favorite airport and be prepared to explain why it is thine fave.

Fly Brother says: Hong Kong International. A triumph of glass, steel, and light, HKG at Chek Lap Kok is a monumental yet supremely user-friendly temple to transcontinental air travel. You could get lost, but there’s plenty of English around to make sure you don’t wander onto the runway. If only they could keep the new terminal but bring back that classic Kai Tak landing.

9. Thou shalt not be a Chatty Cathy with thine seatmate.

Fly Brother says: Never. In fact, the eyes are lowered into a vintage Toni Morrison before the seatbelt light goes on.

8. Thou shalt never hold up the security line.

Fly Brother says: Even though it is ridiculous that only United States security personnel require shoes to be removed, it’s even more ridiculous to continually set off the alarm with the Herringbone you got last weekend at Flea Market USA.

7. Thou shalt be able to order a beer in at least six different languages.

Fly Brother says: Let’s up the ante a little on this one, shall we?
Vodka martini. Shaken, not stirred.
Martini de vodka. Sacudarido, no revuelto.
Vodka martini. Secoué, non remué.
Vodka martini. Ristet, ikke rørt.
Martini, που τινάζεται βότκα μην ανακατωμένος.
揺れるウォッカマルティーニかき混ぜられない。

6. Thou shalt respect the five minute rule when using thine lavatory.

Fly Brother says: This is a tough one on those 17-hour New York to Bangkok flights. Just try to go before you leave home. And don't eat too much.

5. Thou shalt be able to pack a week’s worth of clothes into a single carry-on bag.

Fly Brother says: A good laundry service at your destination and appropriate clothing selection can stretch that week to a month if necessary.

4. Thou shalt not own one of those inflatable neck pillows.

Fly Brother says: While they may be comfortable, they look horrid. Style and comfort must be balanced.

3. Thou shalt have at least one passport stamp from a country that now goes by a different name.

Fly Brother says: This may be difficult for some of the less-seasoned jetrosexuals. A stamp from a country on the US State Department's travel advisory list will do.

2. Thou shalt travel Economy class, on rare occasions, just to keep thine self humble.

Fly Brother says: This is relatively easy when thou payeth for thine own ticket.

1. Thou shalt leave terra firma behind in order to move business and culture forward.

Fly Brother says: Done.

Now, copy and paste this handy pocket-sized list of jetrosexual commandments to print for quick reference in the event of kidnapping or memory loss.


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United to the East, AA f/Fly Bro, FB Winter Tour

United joins Delta in Africa

Photo by AV8NLVR
Last week, United Airlines announced service from Washington-Dulles to Accra, Ghana, continuing on to Lagos, Nigeria. When the flights start in May, UA will become the second major American carrier to serve the Motherland, giving the large Nigerian population in the DC area nonstop access to the country's largest business center and former capital. Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines already flies to Accra and Lagos, as well as Abuja, Nigeria; Dakar, Senegal; Johannesburg, South Africa; and Cairo, Egypt, though they've announced several routes to other African destinations in the past year that either have been terminated or never took off for various reasons. It's nice to see other airlines taking the (lucrative) chance of serving Africa, but I can't imagine the in-flight service even approaching that of the European airlines already flying from the US to the continent via their hubs.

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AA's new black travel website, featuring Fly Brother

Photo by caribb

In October, American Airlines started a travel website centered around the black travel experience called Black Atlas. Headlined by writer and "travel expert-at-large" Nelson George, the site highlights 27 domestic and 15 international destinations sure to resonate with affluent African-American travelers. Readers can submit blog posts detailing their experiences on the road, as well as search for airfares with a special interactive map. They've also been kind enough to feature ya boy, Fly Brother, and his scribblings on Salvador da Bahia, Paris, and Mexico City. Now, that's fly.

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Fly Brother Winter Tour 2009

LOS ANGELES, November 18-23
NEW YORK, December 11-20
ORLANDO, December 20-26
MIAMI, December 29-January 6

If I'm headed your way, shout me!

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From the AV Room: Flying Korean

Today, I'm taking my last transoceanic flight of the RTW, leaving Kuala Lumpur at midnight and arriving in Los Angeles at 10am, via eight hours in Seoul. Total travel time: 25 hours. Because of a hook-up, I'm in business class. But watching this commercial, Korean Air even makes their economy service seem appealing:


Then, there's this enticing ad for their Seoul-Los Angeles-São Paulo service. Tell me you won't wanna be on the next flight down:


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Three Months, Six Continents, Three-Point-Five Grand

Through a combination of one-time tip-offs and dogged research, the universe (and the economy) conspired in my favor to send me traipsing round the Urf this fall with the following ticket prices:

Jacksonville → Baltimore - $88
New York → Dublin - $234
Dublin → London - $48
London → Stockholm - $90
Stockholm → Berlin - $13
Berlin → Istanbul - $68
Istanbul → Cairo - $248
Cairo → Abu Dhabi → Mumbai - $370
Delhi → Kuala Lumpur - $197
Kuala Lumpur ↔ Macau - $85
Kuala Lumpur → Los Angeles - $630 (business class)
Los Angeles ↔ Sydney - $651
Los Angeles → São Paulo → Orlando - $740

Plus several other bus and train trips and short flights = US$3500

Actually, you can get a cheaper round-the-world ticket from specialized agencies like Airtreks or Air Brokers, which allow changes in routing and scheduling for a year, or you could pay a bit more and have a slew of stops on multiple continents with an airline alliance such as oneworld, but a) I ain't have all the money at one time, b) I needed to add a wide-open Brazil flight to the end of the trip (I arrive in Sampa on November 20 and head back to Florida for my brother's wedding next April), and c) what got me on my way was that business class trans-Pacific flight.

Even if you don't have a month off from work or three grand to spend on some grandiose neo-Grand Tour, the ridiculous cost of airplane tickets these days prove that international travel is not a millionaire's game; there's no reason not to pop over for a weekend somewhere that requires a passport.

Check the websites I mentioned here and get packing.

Fly Brother's Revised RTW Itinerary and Confession

First, the itinerary:

The initial flight schedule I posted last month included some pre-round-the-world flights and some planned, but at that time unpurchased, segments. The current itinerary includes all but a couple of connections within India and Australia. New: Two days in Abu Dhabi!

Shout me if our paths will cross anytime this summer/fall:

And now the confession:

I'm an airline geek.

I read Today in the Sky, Airline Route Updates, and The Cranky Flier religiously. I know all the world's major airline hubs (and their three-letter codes) and can guess which airline someone took based on routing. I know which airline is in what alliance and play favorites like any sports fanatic. I get geet when Delta announces a new international route from the world's largest airline hub in that great Southern city of Atlanta, and I honestly wish American Airlines would shrivel up and die and release us all from its figure-four grip on Latin America. I track my own stats at FlightMemory.com (I've flown 0.0019 times the distance to the Sun) and I play around relentlessly with the Great Circle Mapper. I stare for hours at the photos on Airliners.net, sometimes saving them as my computer wallpaper, and sit on airplanes with the in-flight magazine opened devotedly to the route map. And in my dorky nerd solitude, I even created my own fictitious carrier (contingent, of course, upon me being the benevolent dictator of Venezuela and developing the place smartly as a Latin American emirate): Solair—Fly the New Fiesta Route from Europe to Australia, with a free stopover in (fictionally) fabulous Caracas or Tahiti! Naturally, Solair is a member of the SkyTeam alliance.

I've always been this way, inexplicably. In elementary school, I began to collect airline timetables, often holding on toll-free numbers for hours to get exotic-looking flight schedules from Sabena, Saudia, and Singapore (this was totally me). I would get my folks* to take me downtown to the main library to study the airport terminal maps in the phone book-sized OAG (international version, of course). I created my own version of Monopoly called Airopoly, in which players would purchase major airports and try to establish hubs. I collected die-cast and plastic snap-together model airplanes at only $20 a pop. I decorated my room with travel posters I ordered from airline marketing departments. I got a special tour of the airport that I arranged myself in the ninth grade, incidentally the year of my very first plane ride. I applied to the airport management undergraduate program at the Florida Institute of Technology (the very inadequate partial scholarship I received called for a major shift in plans).

*These same folks forced me to throw away all of my timetables and not-so-well-maintained model planes when I finished high school. They claim they had no idea any of it would be worth anything nowadays. Ain't that some shit? Parents.

At college, though, my interests swiveled more towards culture, history, and politics, and the one and only time I seriously applied for an airline job—as a US Airways gate agent in Tallahassee—was thwarted by my ridiculous adolescent driving record ("Heeeeellll naw, you ain't gettin near our planes," I'm sure the guy was thinking). Stupidly, it never occurred to me during the four years I lived in Washington to apply for some part-time gig at United for the flight benefits; my driving record had hardly improved. A couple years ago, I saw an opening with Delta for a corporate communications manager based in Buenos Aires, handling the media in fifteen Latin American and Caribbean countries; I would have been espectacular in that position. But in order to secure the interview that would have secured me the job, I had to first apply through the website, and there ain't nothing on my official CV that would give an airline head hunter pause to consider my professorial self (Shameless plug: I'm great at written/verbal communications, speak Spanish and Portuguese, love aviation, and I'm cute...hire me, somebody!!! American, I didn't mean what I said about dying, eheheh.).

So now, I'm a run-o-the-mill airline aficionado with no real ties to the industry and no big collection of paraphernalia to speak of. Just my mental flights of fancy on Solair, a crapload of aviation trivia in my head, a love of retro airline imagery, an appreciation for the theoretical (if not always financial) ability to jet in a single day from one major population center to another on the opposite side of the globe, and a hankering to lift off the Earth's surface every chance I get.

I've confessed.

Re-post: The Faces of Tragedy

Today, I was all set to welcome the official start of the Atlantic Hurricane Season with a post about my life-long fascination with tropical storms, having grown up in Florida. But in light of Sunday's disappearance of Air France Flight 447, most notably during inclement weather, I've decided to re-post an entry I wrote last year in response to the bombings in Mumbai. I think what I wrote then is very pertinent today.

Originally posted December 3, 2008:

On November 12, 2001, American Airlines Flight 587 from JFK to Santo Domingo crashed in a residential area of Queens, killing all aboard and five on the ground. On October 23, 2006, a fire ripped through a packed city bus in Panama City, Panama, killing eighteen people, mostly women and children. I was reminded of these two events by this post on writer Lara Dunston's cool travel guide. In the post, Lara talks about her stay at Mumbai's recently-attacked Taj Mahal Palace Hotel years ago, having lunched and shopped at some of the places that are now the scenes of incalculably inhumane carnage. Having seen people engage each other, going about the banalities of daily life in these places, tragedies like last week's attacks or the 2001 plane crash or the 2006 bus explosion become much more visceral; you can relate to the people because you've seen their faces.

For me, September 11 was an abstract event, seen from Miami on the same TV screens where violent video games and action flicks and cop reality shows parade incessantly. I processed the events cerebrally and intellectually. After all, I was literally a thousand miles away, knew no one who worked in or lived around Lower Manhattan at the time, and had already confirmed the safety of the few friends I did know then living in New York. I was angry and scared and insecure like most people, and I had seen pictures and footage of the victims on the news. Still, I had no real connection to the event because I had no clue of how the towers looked from up-close, how the air smelled, how the doormen or cleaning ladies would smile or snarl at the secretaries as they entered the building just before or just after their bosses. I couldn't relate.

But I had been on a flight to the Dominican Republic by the time Flight 587 crashed just after take-off three months later. I had been on several, enough to notice a large number of children on every flight heading to the island to visit grandparents, cousins, friends, sometimes involuntarily. The first thing I thought when I heard the news of the crash were cherubic, tanned faces framed by dark Dominican curls, grinning gap-toothed smiles and speaking Noo Yowak-accented Spanglish. A good portion of the people on that flight were kids, I knew instinctively. And that hit me hard.

When I visited Panama over the Christmas holidays back in 2006, the citizenry was still in an uproar about the bus explosion, which occured in the middle of the street right in front of my hotel. The legal mechanisms of the country weren't moving fast enough to implicate the responsible parties, and old, faulty, "refurbished" American school buses were still being used for public transport in the city. And when the desk clerk at the hotel told me about the explosion, about how all but one of the eighteen people killed were women and children (this is unconfirmed, but I took her at her word), I immediately thought about the legions of plump grandmothers and aunts and church ladies in flowered dresses who would never have the energy and the strength required to scramble out of an inferno. At school and church back home in Florida, there were legions of grandmothers and aunts and church ladies who looked like the ones I saw walking the streets of Panama City, and I had to assume that these were the same types of ladies who burned to death on that bus. I couldn't shake the image from my mind.

In an age of media desensitization and relative human safety (compared to previous centuries of war and disease and saber-toothed tiger maulings), it's very easy to live most of your life looking at tragedies on the news and, as pointed out in Hotel Rwanda, say "what a shame" before turning back to your dinner. But you can't do that as easily when you've seen their faces.


This New York Times opinion piece puts another face on Mumbai.

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Stupid Cheap Summer Airfares That You Would Be Stupid to Ignore

Photo by Gun Sydney

These are some of the deals I've found for round-trip international travel in June, July, and August (some even extend into the fall, when the weather's heating up Down Under). Dust off the passport (or apply for one) and get them bags packed:

Chicago to Dublin*, Ireland - $498 on Delta

Chicago to San Jose, Costa Rica - $277 on TACA

Los Angeles to Buenos Aires, Argentina - $598 on United

Los Angeles to Frankfurt*, Germany - $517 on Delta

Los Angeles to Manila, Philippines - $588 on Delta

Los Angeles to Panama City, Panama - $297 on American

New York-JFK to Santo Domingo, Dominican Rep. - $341 on JetBlue

New York-LaGuardia to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - $513 on United ($541 on Delta)

Newark to Berlin*, Germany - $519 on Continental/KLM

Newark to Cartagena, Colombia - $393 on Continental/Copa

Newark to Sydney, Australia - $712 on United ($573 from LA!!!!!!)

San Francisco to Tokyo, Japan - $454 on Air Canada (early-mid June only)

Washington to Frankfurt*, Germany - $526 on Lufthansa

*Once in Germany or Ireland, you can hop over to almost any other major European city for as little as $40 each way.

And right now, round trips from the East Coast out West and vice-versa are also stupid cheap, often $200 or less, so not living in San Fran or LA is no excuse; DC people, hit that Chinatown Bus to The City. I found these fares by first checking the forums on frequent traveler website FlyerTalk, then verifying on the individual airline sites, or on Farecast, Orbitz, Expedia, Farecompare, or Airfare Watchdog (which is especially handy by alerting you of fare sales from any airport you desire). If you can, play around with the dates or destinations; I'm sure you'll find something worth salivating over.

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