https://www.yahoo.com/news/atlanta-tesla-thief-more-90-021331854.html
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Yet they still have a low birth rate:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/japan-weighs-finally-lifting-age-084511572.html
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I’m more curious about where they got the gas. Airliners generally have low reserves as weight eats into profits, so they calculate the amount of fuel the weather will probably require, plus the diversion to their published secondary, plus some small margin.
The other question is, since ALL commercial flights require IFR flight plans, AND those generally require a secondary airport if conditions at the primary deteriorate to the point of the plane not being legally landable, what was their secondary - and why didn’t they use it.
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In recent times there is so much incompetence that when I ask a logical question like yours, I immediately ask the follow up is it just pure incompetence.
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Another article reported the airline saying that landing at their alternate would have tied up the aircraft for several days, and they needed it for other routes.
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Excellent question! It is worth noting that a great circle route from NZ to New York involves flying across much of the breadth of the United States – not far from airports like LAX, DFW, ATL, ORD. As a passenger who has from time to time been on diverted flights, I would much rather have been landed at an alternative airport in the US and then made my own way to my final destination on another airline. The plane could have returned to NZ not far off its original return time.
In the meantime, the airline now has the problem of a planeload of passengers whom they still have an obligation to transport from NZ to NY. That is going to tie up a plane.
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In this case, the plane had only gotten about as far as Hawaii when they received news of the JFK terminal closure. They would have had to arrange flying on to the U.S. mainland, finding an alternate able to accept the passengers, and arranging onward transportation for them. Then they would probably have had to “dead head” the empty airliner back to New Zealand, at substantial expense, to maintain the schedule. Since it had the fuel to return to Auckland, that was a simpler solution.
If they had reached the U.S. mainland before receiving the news, they probably would have made a different decision.
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In other words they thought it was cheaper to blow the gas for the equivalent of a one way trip, then have to do it again - for free, as the pax had already paid, than to go to an alternate, discharge the pax, and then find some work to help pay. for the trip home. That way they wouldn’t have totally lost a plane load of gas, which they do this way.
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I have to agree with Devereaux’s analysis. How many of the passengers would have preferred to have been dropped off at Hawaii and then flown on to New York on the much more trafficked route from Hawaii to NY than to spend 16 hours on a plane literally getting nowhere? Or the airline could have minimized the costs it would have to pay to the forwarding airlines by getting much closer to New York.
Airlines need to make money – but they will not do that long-term unless they first provide good service to their paying passengers.
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For what it’s worth, that Air New Zealand flight is the only nonstop from Auckland to New York, so there’s no direct competition. (You’ll see a United Airlines flight in a search, but that is a code-share for the same Air New Zealand flight.)
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For what it’s worth, that Air New Zealand flight is the only nonstop from Auckland to New York, so there’s no direct competition. (You’ll see a United Airlines flight in a search, but that is a code-share for the same Air New Zealand flight.)”
If that’s true, then since all airlines overbook to insure max load, bet there were any number of standby’s that would have taken the flight back. And * that* would have gone a ways to paying for the gas.
There’s an old joke: “?Know how to make a million dollars in the airline business. Start with four million”. These kinds of decisions are how such jokes originate. I simply cannot believe an airline couldn’t find a way to make this a less painful cost.
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From Air New Zealand’s website: “Now flying non-stop from Auckland to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Honolulu, Houston, Chicago and New York.”
OK, first the obligatory joke – Now flying non-stop from Auckland to … Auckland.
It seems that ANZ has ground staff in Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles. And they had up to 8 hours of flight time remaining. Lots of time for the ANZ ground staff at whichever ANZ airport they chose to divert to who could have arranged alternative onward flights. That is what has happened on the few diverted long distance flights I have had the misfortune to be on.
Just a bad decision by Air New Zealand.
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And if you fly from an airport only served by United Express it (at least in 2017) costs way more to take the codeshare flight out of Chicago. Their preferred routing was rural snowbelt to Chicago to LAX to Sydney to Auckland.
The airline could, but I’d wonder if it was a 2am decision by some lower level person with so little seniority they were stuck with the night shift, and whose decision maklng ability showed why.
If you go to NZ there’s a tourist train from Auckland to Wellington. It’s a great trip and you get to ride up and around the Raurimu Spiral
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Puffin, the publisher of Dahl’s classic works, has hired sensitivity readers to make changes to certain portions of the author’s wording in the U.K. editions as part of an effort to ensure the books “can continue to be enjoyed by all today.”
The publisher’s rewrite, first reported by The Telegraph, altered numerous descriptions of certain characters’ physical appearances, removed references to some characters being fat, and changed some language to be gender-neutral.
Augustus Gloop, the chubby character featured in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” is now described as “enormous,” while Mrs. Twit, a character from “The Twits,” is described as just “beastly” instead of “ugly and beastly.”
In “James and the Giant Peach,” the character of Miss Sponge is no longer described as “the fat one,” Miss Spider’s head is not “black” anymore, and the Earthworm has given up its “lovely pink” skin for “lovely smooth skin.”
In Dahl’s “The Witches”, first published in 1983, a paragraph noting that witches are bald beneath their wigs includes a new line that reads: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”
In December 2020, Dahl’s family released a statement three decades after his passing to apologize for the “hurt” his books caused.
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Emily Claire Hari was sentenced to 14 years in prison for domestic terrorism crimes.
Formerly known as Michael B. Hari, Emily was sentenced for threats of violence, attempted arson, unlawful possession of a machine-gun, and unlawful possession of a firearm as a felon.
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In September, 2021, Netflix bought the Roald Dahl Story Company outright, including all of the copyrights to his work, for US$ 686 million, according to Subscription Insider, “Netflix Buys Roald Dahl Story Company for $686 Million”, quoting a Financial Times article which is behind a paywall.
The subscription streaming service announced last week they are acquiring the Roald Dahl Story Company (RDSC), buying the rights to iconic stories like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda and James and the Giant Peach which have entertained readers and viewers for generations. The deal is reportedly worth about $686 million, or £500 million, according to the Financial Times.
According to other reports, the Bowdlerising of Dahl’s work by the “sensitivity readers” of the Orwellian-named company Inclusive Minds, “a collective for people who are passionate about inclusion, diversity, equality and accessibility in children’s literature, and are committed to changing the face of children’s books”, was underway before the Netflix acquisition, but obviously they’re cool with it.
Here are some of the “improvements”, according to the Telegraph.
Note that effective “eternal corporate copyright” means that all works that end up in a corporate portfolio are subject to “improvement” or un-publication at the whim of corporate management or the cry of the mob.
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More from ‘can’t make these up’:
and
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From “The Creeping Terror” by Richard Matheson:
On February 11, 1973, the Los Angeles Movement forded the Hudson River and invaded Manhattan Island. Flame-throwing tanks proved futile against the invincible flux. Within a week the subways were closed and car purchases had trebled.
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