“Hey, what does this button do?”

Major Oops Could Cost Airline Big Money

An embarrassing incident at an American Airlines maintenance base in Fort Worth left a plane badly damaged, after the landing gear retracted, sending the nose of the jumbo jet crashing to the ground.

“Well Martha, they did promise we would see whales on this cruise”.

Cruise ship impales fin whale, docks in Vancouver

A fin whale has been impaled and killed on a Princess cruise ship that docked in Vancouver Saturday morning.

The whale, about 20 metres long, was wrapped around the bow of the Sapphire Princess Saturday in full view of tourists at the Canada Place tourist hub, many snapping pictures of the disturbing sight.

“I know it’s somewhere around here… Lookout!!”

‘Blundering’ private pilot gets lost, flies in path of 747 landing at JFK

A private pilot at the helm of a small aircraft apparently came close to causing a disaster in the skies near New York on Saturday. That’s when he flew his small craft in front of a Boeing 747 jumbo jet — and possibly other commercial aircraft — trying to land at JFK Airport, according to the New York Post. The 69-year-pilot, a retired Navy pilot living in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., apparently made the error Saturday afternoon when he got lost and could not find his way to Republic Airport, which is farther out on Long Island than JFK. During the episode, a Boeing 747 operated by Taiwan’s Eva Air had to abort its landing to avoid the private plane, the Post reports.

And just to show that the whales don’t have any hard feelings…

Beluga whale carries struggling diver to surface

A DROWNING diver has a beluga whale to thank for helping to save her life after her legs were paralysed by cramps.

I have accidently tried to open the wrong hotel room, or even been directed to the wrong hotel room so this story strikes me as so many kinds of wrong:

Man shot, killed while trying to enter wrong motel room

Seattle sound engineer Tom Pfaeffle, 49, was shot to death last Friday night at a motel in eastern Washington as he was trying to put his room key into the door of the wrong room, according to the Seattle Times.

And the creepiest story of the week is this one:

How private are we in hotel rooms? Female sportscaster filmed naked through hotel door peephole

It’s a horrible situation for Erin Andrews (see her lawyers’ statement at Game On), who probably was on a routine business trip and didn’t think twice about disrobing in her supposedly private hotel room. The surreptitious filming, however, goes beyond Andrew’s unfortunate situation.

There is no evidence that she was texting and driving (see below) or doing anything else stupid, but you do have to be more careful when the local wildlife can eat you.

Tourist drives her car into croc-infested East Alligator River

A tourist drove her car into a croc-infested river on the fringe of Kakadu National Park after confusing a boat ramp for a road crossing. Her four-wheel-drive became submerged in the East Alligator River, about 300 kilometres east of Darwin, last Thursday.

Chris, a lovely chart but no big surprise here. When a baby screams behind you in a plane it is very annoying but you still accomplish what you set out to do which is travel. In a movie theatre however…

Surprise! Screaming babies on planes isn’t your top annoyance, says survey

What could be worse that screaming babies on a plane? Screaming babies in a movie theater, according to a new survey by Baby Orajel teething pain medicine.

Read a little deeper into this story. The number one complaint about French travelers is that they speak French rather than English and don’t learn the local language. I suspect the tables have turned from when French was (quite literally) the lingua franca of travel.

French travelers ranked as world’s worst

French tourists are the worst in the world, coming across as bad at foreign languages, tight-fisted and arrogant, according to a survey of 4,500 hotel owners across the world.

I will let the next story pass without comment…

Delta’s big attendents unable to wear new uniform; union protests

Delta is not offering its new red-dress uniforms to its biggest flight attendants. That has the union that represented attendants at Northwest – now a subsidiary of Delta – crying foul, The Associated Press reports. The Atlanta Journal Constitution says Delta’s “uniform policy … keeps flight attendants larger than size 18 from wearing Delta’s eye-catching signature red dress.” The airline offers the red-dress uniform only through size 18. However, the St. Paul Pioneer Press notes that, “in navy blue, the Delta Air Lines female flight attendants’ uniform dresses go up to size 28.”

Other interesting stories:

• Bumped from your flight? You’ve got rights
• Truck-driving text messagers 23 times more likely to get into an accident
• Report: Armed bandits raid Amazon River cruise ship carrying Americans