The arrivals page on the Abu Dhabi airport website is interesting. It gives you the option to search for flights that landed the previous day but nothing ever shows up. It’s like no flight landed yesterday!

Seems you can’t get info on any flight 1 hour after it lands. Makes sense since you’ll probably have past immigration and would be in a cab by then or even reached your hotel. But I still think they should make that fact a little more clear on this page or remove the “Yesterday” option.

Came across the Sabre Red App Centre today. I think it’s a great move for Sabre and hope they move to a more open source approach to enable more developers to code great apps.

The site currently has very basic info and the “contact us” option on the Dev Centre page has no link so it looks like they don’t want anyone to contact them about this feature anytime soon.

John Steffen has come up with a real fast method of boarding airplanes.

“They should board from the back, each taking a seat on every other row, starting with the  window seats first.”

This sounds pretty good but I doubt it would work on most Middle East and India routes. I like the part in the video where they mention that Science may not be able to cure stupidity. They were referring to cases where people occupy the wrong seats. And if you have flown in this region, you know there is no shortage of stupidity.

And add to all this the amount of bulky cabin baggage most people carry on board … not including the duty-free shopping spree goodies.

Google’s experimental hotel finder engine is looking good. It only supports hotels in the U.S. currently.

I really like the “Edit shape” option on their map. Haven’t seen this one before on any other site. And the site is very fast. That’s Google for you.

The format of the search results are very neat too. I like that they focused more on images and reviews and less on a hotel description.

I’d like to see how this looks a few months down the line. A real competition killer in the making!

I just had to share this. Crowne Plaza London will introduce “Snore Absorption Rooms” this month. I bet Ro considers me the ultimate guinea pig for testing if this new technology actually helps.

Looks like they use a combination of 5 “anti-snoring” techniques/technologies to solve the problem. Wonder how easy it would be to setup something like this at home. I’ve copied and highlighted an extract from their site below…

“The room uses proven technology to help reduce the dreaded, repetitive nasal noise. The technology includes:

• Sound proofing on walls to absorb the loud frequencies, deflect the sound waves and minimise the impact of snoring. The walls use egg box style foam which reduces the noise reverberating in the room

• A specially designed sound absorbing head board that will work together with the sound proof walling to muffle the echo within the room

• An anti-snoring bed wedge which acts as a body pillow, encouraging snoring guests to sleep on their sides or upright. Lying flat on your back makes the base of the tongue and soft palate collapse to the back wall of the throat which causes snoring

• An anti-snoring pillow which uses rare neodymium magnets to create a natural magnetic field,  opening the airways and stiffening the upper palate which vibrates during snoring

• A white noise machine which is proven to help drown out the droning snoring noise and help sleep and relaxation“

I found this video on YouTube. Reminds me of the Jetsons. This is travel in 2121. I think most of this is possible in the next 5-10 years. Well almost at least, I doubt the bit with the Martians will happen anytime soon.

I found this very interesting chart on global airline traffic at Amadeus. It’s based on a study between airconomy and Amadeus.

The FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) recently granted Executive Jet Management the permission to use iPads instead of large stacks of paper for charting and maps. This was after a 3 month period of testing including 55 pilots on 250 flights.

Seems the Mobile TC application developed by Jeppesen never failed during any of the tests. And neither did the iPad.

A lot of other airlines & pilots are bound to start with this trend. So long as that’s the ONLY app installed on the iPad, I think it should be fine. Wouldn’t want the pilots competing for the highest scores on Angry Birds instead of flying the plane.

Came across Flight Radar 24 this morning when one of my colleagues inquired about monitoring flights in real time.

I immediately focused on the Middle East region and found an interesting flight path. Looks like the site tracked this flight’s take off and landing multiple times as it shuttled between Kuwait and Dubai. There was another interesting flight path where it looked like some flights just took a u-turn in the middle of the Indian ocean and flew back. Quite interesting to see this interactive picture of what’s happening in the skies above.

What’s more interesting is that it only costs about 600 EUR to setup your own receiver and antenna (up to 350km range) to pull up this info on your personal computer. Most commercial aircraft models are supported but no surprise that hardly any military ones were present. Who would have thought it’s this easy to track our flight movements?

Well they aren’t really that new. But Sabre deactivated the old web service URLs and sent out the new list labelled as

CERT, TSTS, DEV & PROD.

Now if any average developer looked at this list, they would assume that DEV was meant for them, CERT for certification, TSTS for testing and PROD for live production use. Looks like our supplier/developer forgot to RTFM where it states that DEV actually creates live bookings with the airlines.

And in the process of testing our new booking engine, in two days Mr. John Doe made some 85 live bookings and a lot of it flying first class (KWD 3,000/- tickets).  I got the shock of my life when our operations team called up inquiring about the bookings. Seems one of the airlines called up. We probably blocked their entire first class quota travelling to London during this peak December period.

If we hadn’t caught this mistake in time, it could have been the most expensive development disaster in the Online Booking Engine business. Now that’s what I call a near miss.