Clickable Data: Airline Social Media All-Stars
The use of emerging social media (Twitter, Facebook, and blogs) by the airline industry continues to grow healthily. These venues offer airlines the opportunity to communicate with customers in a way that is much more personalized, immediate, and trend-aware than traditional advertising, PR, and customer service venues.
The airlines that are excelling in the use of social media are listed in the table below, arranged in descending order by a ranking score that is derived from:
• Number of Twitter followers (if the airline uses Twitter)
• Number of Facebook fans or friends (if the airline uses Facebook)
• Number of Google search results for its blog (if the airline has one)
Ohio Aviation Hero’s Remains Found?
by Kristina Smith Horn
CentralOhio.com
Talented, handsome and famous, Lt. Col. Jack Zimmerman seemed indestructible. The Fremont native, who logged more than two million miles in flight, escaped a fiery plane crash in Pittsburgh with only a few scrapes and bruises.
He flew FBI agents to nab notorious kidnapper and thug Alvin “Creepy” Karpis — the FBI’s “Public Enemy No. 1″ — and won the gratitude of bureau director J. Edgar Hoover. He braved freezing wind, rain and snow in an open cockpit to deliver mail by plane. He flew missions for the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II in Northern Europe.
But the rough, icy waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, northeast of Maine, proved too much for the “Million Miler” during his final mission on Nov. 2, 1942. Zimmerman’s amphibious plane capsized, drowning him and four others. Nearly 67 years later, Zimmerman’s body may finally be laid to rest.
Read the rest of the story »
Large Aircraft Wallpapers for Download
I’ve arranged links to several interesting images of large aircraft on my ‘About/ Bio‘ page.
These are all of a sufficient size (1024×768 or larger) that they would make great wallpapers on your Mac, *nix workstation, or PC. Simply go here and click on the thumbnail to see the large image; right-click on either the thumbnail or the large image to download. The image file format is .PNG.
My favorites are the 777 cockpit (from Airliners.net), a C-5 military transport digesting a smaller fighter jet, and a workhorse 747 carrying the space shuttle Atlantis. (Reminds me of an early Navy learning: “Difference between a boat, and a ship? A ship carries boats, but a boat can’t carry a ship.” I guess the shuttle is just a boat, when compared to a 747!)
Please note that actually reading my boring bio is not a requirement for downloading the images! 
(By the way, for the full story behind the near-beach landing of the KLM 747 pictured above, go here. You may want to click that thumbnail as well.)
“United Breaks Guitars” Goes to Washington
Dave Carroll, the baggage-busted, guitar-disrespected Canadian musician and viral archnemesis of United Airlines, has announced that he has been invited to testify before Congress in a September 22 hearing concerning passengers rights.
Dave has not yet released more information than this, but anyone wanting or needing to learn more about his appearance should follow Dave on Twitter. (He also has a Facebook page and a web site.)
I expect that Dave’s testimony will happen before the Senate’s Science, Commerce, and Transportation Committee, in support of S.213, the Airline Passenger Bill of Rights Act of 2009.
C-SPAN publishes the complete Congressional hearings schedules on this page, which includes links to streaming audio of the hearings as well. (As of the date of this post, information about the 9/22 S.213 hearing is not yet available on the C-SPAN site.)
[ As it turns out, Dave Carroll and Jeremy Cooperstock (here and here), are two talented, no-nonsense Canadians who are the bane of United's existence. I have it on good authority that Glenn Tilton, United CEO and magisterial head of the Air Transport Association, is quite concerned about Canadian meddling in U.S. air space. He has apparently dispatched an envoy (UAL spokesperson Robin Urbanski; new BFF of Dave but ... hmmm ... not Jeremy) to her Majesty, the Queen of England and Canada and elsewhere, to formally request that she (the Queen) constrain her citizenry from pestering the corporate royalty of the United States' formerly preeminent airline. -- Ed. ]
jetBlue: Relationships + Leadership + Innovation2
Author and journalist Marc Gunther offers up some wonderful insights concerning the nature of jetBlue’s success, in a CNN article published last Thursday that was accompanied a day later by a post in Gunther’s own blog.
Gunther accompanied jetBlue CEO Dave Barger on a flight to jetBlue University in Orlando, the airline’s employee training facility, and his writing seems to confirm that jetBlue is the “new Southwest.”
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