Category: air travel

I fly a lot and am considered a master beyond my years by industry experts in corporate travel. I have flown so much that I have received Christmas gifts from the major airlines. One time when I was taking a couple of months off and trying to stay home more I actually received calls from the airlines asking where I was and if everything was alright. That is too much. That is too much because of the wear and tear it places on your body and family life but also because of the dent it places in your wallet. I have found a method of correcting those issues, at least the expense part anyway.

I received a phone call from a man asking if he could have the honor of booking my next set of travel arrangements for me. During a short interview he asked me where I typically went, how often I traveled, where I liked to sit on airplanes, which airlines I preferred, how much I was typically spending per flight to different locations, what hotel accommodations I liked to have I stayed in needed to have for me to be happy, what size and type of rental cars I preferred, all about my frequent traveler programs and away he went. I tucked it in the back of my mind and forgot about it.

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Every year, several thousand people die or get injured in airline accidents. Traveling on a commercial airline is not as safe as you would like to believe. On average 1,000 to 2,000 people die, and roughly 2,000 to 5,000 are injured every year since the 1930’s, as regular as clockwork.

Airline accidents are now so common that they usually don’t make headline news, and many ‘minor’ incidents involving just one or two fatalities and injuries usually go unreported in the press. Unless you have personal experience of an airline accident, you can easily go through life thinking that they virtually never occur.

One astonishing fact is that ninety four percent of plane accidents happen on take off and landing, accounting for about 88 percent of fatalities (figures for injuries are generally not recorded). The other four percent of plane accidents happen while the plane is cruising, accounting for about 12 percent of fatalities. The source for this is the ‘Statistical Summary of Commercial Jet Airplane Accidents, Boeing’.

But another even more astonishing fact is that pilot and flight crew error account for over 60% of all airline calamities. And remember that here we are talking about regular commercial airlines, without including private planes, military aircraft, etc. Source: information compiled by the website Air Crash Info.

The processes of all animals and plants follow a 24-hour rhythm called body clock. This is our personal synchronization with the daylight-darkness cycle. When you travel in an airplane crossing time zones, say from New York to Houston, your body clock cannot adjust itself quickly enough. Your will lose sync with the new daylight-darkness cycle of where you left (NY) and does not recover quickly for the place that you are going (Houston). This causes a condition of disorientation called jet lag.

A person experiencing jet lag can feel cranky, mildly depressed, as well as forgetful. The person may find it difficult to concentrate, may suffer a loss of appetite and may suffer from disturbed sleep pattern. The may become dehydrated and get swollen feet.

Jet lag is not caused by the actual time in the air spent but crossing time zones. A journey from Frankfurt to New York is likely to cause jet lag but a journey from Frankfurt to Johannesburg will not. These two cities, Frankfurt and Johannesburg, lie within the same time zone. The length of time in an airplane is sure to cause discomfiture mostly because you are sitting in a little seat in the same cramped position for a long time but not necessarily jet lag.