Here’s Why Airlines Are Ending Change FeesWhile there won’t be fees for altering your travel plans, you’ll probably have to choose higher fares or cheap, inflexible tickets.
I Am Now a Seat Recline CentristMan, a lot of you have asked me about Delta’s announcement that they are reducing the amount that economy-class seats can recline.
Not Leavin’ on a Jet Plane
• Jet Blue, the generally beloved low-cost carrier, made a lot of people’s shit lists last night: It stranded hundreds of JFK passengers on the tarmac — on immobile planes — for up to ten hours. On Valentine’s Day. Let’s hope, at least, some romance bloomed in the forced close quarters. [amNY]
• The Daily News is issuing a Cesar Borja mea culpa. The paper that had lionized the late cop the most says it had no factual basis for calling him a “volunteer” (he wasn’t) or implying he had rushed to the WTC site on 9/11 (he didn’t). [NYDN]
• In a development the Post — and just about only the Post — finds “shocking,” it turns out Hillary Clinton had signed a $200K contract with a consulting firm headed by a prominent South Carolina politician days before said politician endorsed her. [NYP]
• That classic New York boogeyman — stray sidewalk electricity — is back. This time, the victim is a pet. Not even twenty minutes of mouth-to-mouth CPR could save the terrier named Boston Bob, apparently electrocuted when he stepped on a manhole cover. [NYDN]
• And speaking of classic boogeymen: Apparently, Son of Sam’s apartment in Yonkers is a bit of a tourist destination — with a Times profile that eerily smacks of a real-estate listing. (“Apartment 7E, a studio with sweeping views of the Hudson River …”) [NYT]
the morning line
Remembering 587
• A new memorial to American 587’s crash, the second-deadliest air disaster in U.S. history, was dedicated Sunday in Belle Harbor. It’s a curved granite wall with the victims’ names and a line from a poem in Spanish (most of the 265 victims were Dominicans heading to Santo Domingo). On the crash site itself, residential construction is in full swing. [NYT]
• If you lived through the transit strike last year, you kind of hated union boss Roger Toussaint. And that was before you knew he had a secret deal with the MTA while the strike was still going on, as the Daily News reveals today. What a guy. [NYDN]
• A high-powered Manhattan lawyer was found dead near his abandoned BMW in an upstate bird sanctuary — an apparent suicide; the man was out on $225,000 bail on a rape charge he vehemently denied. [NYP]
• The flap over Charlie Rangel’s already-infamous “Who the hell wants to live in Mississippi?” continues, with local newspapers there alternately asking the feisty congressman to come visit their fair state and heaving invective on New York. [Gotham Gazette]
• And what’s the Post’s headline of the day? There are plenty of contenders, from “Mick Jagger Rocks On in Grief” to “Bearied!” but we’ll go with Egg Foo Gun, about a handgun smuggled into a hospital in a Chinese-food carton. Well done, Post. [NYP]
intel
Coffee, Tea, or a Stained-Glass Window?
For sale: a modernist landmark. Asking price: just $1 million and change.
American Airlines is building a new terminal at Kennedy Airport, and to do so, one of its existing homes — Terminal 8 — must come down. And that means the destruction of a 317-foot-wide stained-glass window in the building — once the largest stained-glass window in the world — unless flight attendant Eileen Vaquilar Clifford can help it.
party lines
On Delta Airlines’ Secret Service
You can’t bring water on your flight anymore, but that doesn’t mean you can’t wet your beak. At least if you’re flying Delta, where efforts to ease passenger tension in this age of check-in delays and cavity searches have turned to that time-tested panacea: designer booze. Well aware that a buzzed flier is likely a happier one, the airline enlisted nightlife mogul Rande Gerber to create a special cocktail list, which will be available on Delta flights starting next year. To promote this, and for reasons we don’t begin to comprehend, last night the airline gathered a trio of former James Bond girls (Delta is adding a direct New York-to-London flight later this month, and yes, Bond is British, but that’s a tenuous connection at best) and a gaggle of guests — mostly men, most old enough to prefer Pussy Galore to Christmas Jones — at Gerber’s Stone Rose, which is in the Time Warner Center and thus far from any airport, to drink to drunk flying.
Grace Jones — perhaps you know her as May Day from A View to a Kill — was clad in a shimmering vintage Issey Miyake number replete with a hood and definitely could use that drink. “I actually have to fly back to London tomorrow at 8 a.m.,” she said. “Not on Delta, though. I need me a sleeper bed, so I’m flying British Airways.”
Awkward pause.
