Airports, Americas, Europe, In the News, Weekly

This week: Dublin to eat Heathrow’s lunch? Abandoned airports & more

Another week has flown by – pardon the pun – and with that we’ve got a full bag of interesting and entertaining airport news for you:

The most interesting and maybe most surprising airport related article in our view was the one from The Telegraph asking the question whether Dublin Airport (DUB) is eating Heathrow’s lunch? The article starts with saying that Dublin Airport is mopping up business from passengers in Scotland and the north of England who want to avoid flying via Heathrow and other European hub airports to the US, according to Aer Lingus. The Irish flag carrier said transfer passengers from the UK and other parts of Europe now make up almost a third of its long-haul traffic to North America. Most interestingly however is the fact that passengers who fly to America via Dublin airport’s terminal 2 can go through all US immigration and customs inspections before they take-off, avoiding potentially lengthy queues at the other end. This surely is worth considering a diffferent, non-Heathrow-bound route!

Less good news arrived this week from New York, where the Daily News reported smoke was spotted in the cockpit of Envoy Air Flight 3340 after it took off around 3:20 p.m. at LaGuardia Airport (LGA) Wednesday. The plane returned to the airport and was evacuated. The Embraer 135 was headed for Knoxville, Tenn. with 44 passengers and three crew, none of whom were reported injured.

An entirely different article then reached us from online blog io9. The site featured an interesting article about “tattered, haunting remains of abandoned airports”. You will get to see airports such as the Nicosia International Airport in Cyprus used between 1939 and 1974, now partially used as the headquarters of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus or – quite topical probably – Yasser Arafat International Airport in the Gaza Strip. Definitely worthwhile putting this one on your reading list.

The Sydney Morning Herald this week reported about a Finnish airport passenger tracking system. According to the article Helsinki’s airport (HEL) will be the world’s first to track passengers to within feet, a plan being hailed as a technological breakthrough – and drawing scrutiny from privacy advocates. Sensors will monitor all mobile phones with wi-fi access turned on from parking lot to takeoff, helping to observe crowding and prevent bottlenecks at the two-terminal airport which 15 million fliers pass through a year. Passengers opting in through an application will also receive offers from shops and restaurants, as well as gate and flight information. The Helsinki airport operator, Finavia, won’t see any personal information about the user or the device as all data stays in an aggregated form, said its chief executive officer in the article.

And to finish the week off, we thought we’d offer you a bit of eye candy in the form of Fast.Co.Design’s article about stylish airport hotels. The article claims that airport hotels usually lack in glamour what they make up for in convenience: for overnight connections, you’ll withstand an uncomfortable bed and tacky wall art for a location just minutes from your gate. But surely the portrayed hotels such as the CitizenM Hotel at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport (CDG) doesn’t fit into this description -it’s stylishly designed as well as it is convenient. Read all suggestions on their website.

That’s all for this week – safe travels!

(Photo by Milos Bicanski/Getty Images via io9.com)