Travel

At least 10 passengers on a Spirit Airlines flight from Dallas to Orlando were taken to hospitals after a battery fire forced the pilot to make an emergency landing in Jacksonville on Wednesday, officials said. Firefighters responded to Jacksonville International Airport Wednesday afternoon for reports of smoke in the cockpit of a plane, Jacksonville Fire and Rescue Capt. Eric Prosswimmer said. A battery had ignited in an overhead compartment, but flight crew members and passengers, including a retired firefighter, were able to put it out before firefighters arrived, he said. “They did a phenomenal job,” Prosswimmer said. At least 10 people were taken to multiple hospitals, including passengers and crew members, he said. All had non-life-threatening conditions. In photos...

A Southwest Airlines flight from Cuba to Florida turned back to Havana for an emergency landing Sunday after it hit birds and suffered engine trouble in an incident that filled the cabin with smoke, airline and Cuban officials said. Flight 3923 had just taken off from Havana for Fort Lauderdale late Sunday morning when it was believed to have “experienced bird strikes to an engine and the aircraft’s nose,” a spokesperson for the airline said. Pilots detected an issue with one of the engines after the bird strike, said Cuba’s civil aviation authority, Cuban Aviation Corporation S.A. The airline did not immediately confirm engine trouble. Video recorded on the plane shows the cabin filling up with smoke as passengers begin to panic. “Nobody could breathe. It was burn...

HARTFORD, Conn. — A business jet flying over New England violently pitched upward then downward, fatally injuring a passenger, after pilots responding to automated cockpit warnings switched off a system that helps keep the aircraft stable, U.S. transportation investigators reported Friday. The National Transportation Safety Board didn’t reach any conclusions in its preliminary report on the main cause of the deadly March 3 accident, but it described a series of things that went wrong before and after the plane swooped out of control. Confronted with several alerts in the cockpit of the Bombardier jet, pilots followed a checklist and turned off a switch that “trims” or adjusts the stabilizer on the plane’s tail, the report said. The plane’s nose then swept upward, subjecting the people ...

The Transportation Department is launching a dashboard to clarify which airlines seat children 13 and under next to an accompanying adult for no extra charge in the latest push by the Biden administration to crack down on hidden corporate fees. The department said it has received a number of complaints in which children, including one as young as 11 months, were not seated next to an accompanying adult. The DOT undertook a review of airlines’ family seating policies and found that carriers did not guarantee young children would sit next to an adult, although they generally had policies that aimed to do so. The department said in a statement Monday that no U.S. airlines guaranteed fee-free family seating as recently as a month ago. In recent weeks, carriers including United, Front...

Two flights scheduled to depart from Boston Logan International Airport on Monday morning made contact with each other near the gate area, federal aviation and airport officials said. United Airlines Flight 515 was being pushed back from the gate by a tow tug when its right wing struck the tail of United Airlines Flight 267 parked at a neighboring gate around 8:30 a.m., according to preliminary information released by the Federal Aviation Administration. Both jets were Boeing 737s. No injuries were reported. Flight 515 was heading to Newark, and Flight 267 was scheduled to fly to Denver, airport officials said. Both jets were taken out of service, United said in an emailed statement. “Customers on both aircraft deplaned normally and we’ve made arrangements to get them to their destinat...

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — A small plane crash in Tennessee that killed weight-loss guru Gwen Shamblin Lara and six others likely happened when her husband piloting the plane — actor Joe Lara — became disoriented in heavy clouds, a final report by the National Transportation Safety Board says. Joe Lara, who played Tarzan in the 1990s TV series “Tarzan: The Epic Adventures,” was flying a Cessna C501 on March 29, 2021, when the aircraft plunged into Percy Priest Lake, minutes after takeoff from an airport just outside Nashville. Gwen Shamblin in Brentwood, Tenn., on June 29, 2004.John Russell / AP file Flight track data found that the plane “made a series of heading changes, along with several climbs and descents, before it entered a steep, descending left turn,” according to the crash report re...

A pilot from another airline helped land a Southwest Airlines flight Wednesday after its captain became “incapacitated” and required medical attention, forcing the plane to turn back to Las Vegas, according to the airline and radio traffic data. Southwest Flight 6013 was bound for Columbus, Ohio, on Wednesday when one of its pilots “needed medical attention,” a spokesperson for the airline said, without giving details about the health issue. In radio traffic archived by the website LiveATC, a person can be heard saying that the captain had started to feel stomach pain and then “fainted or became incapacitated” around five minutes later. The person says the captain “came back” around 60 seconds later and was being looked after in the back...

The Federal Aviation Administration issued an alert on Wednesday to key personnel in the airline industry after a series of near collisions and a safety summit last week aimed at avoiding a catastrophe. The Safety Alert for Operators was issued for integral industry personnel such as directors of operations, chief pilots, directors of training, check airmen, directors of safety, program managers, pilots and operators, the alert said. The alert is meant to have the key personnel brush up on safety standards and protocols. Some of the recommendations included: ·     Use all available internal communication processes to specifically highlight recent events and existing issues; ·     Reinforce adherence to published processes and procedures, including checklists, air traffic control instr...

Last November, the city raised its hotel bed tax to 5.5%, up from 2%, and earmarked funds from the increase — an estimated $5.3 million in 2023 — for the housing and child care initiatives, said Kara Franker, the CEO of Visit Estes Park, a local tourism group. That beefed-up bed tax now combines with town, county and state sales tax to add a cumulative 14.2% onto the cost of a nightly stay in the city, she said, helping to fund a range of public services alongside the new workforce-related initiatives. According to Colorado tourism officials, at least 17 municipalities have imposed a new bed tax or modified an existing one over the past year, many of them putting the revenue toward new types of projects. Similar moves are happening in tourism-heavy areas across the U.S., said John Lamb...

Chaos erupted aboard a Southwest Airlines plane in Dallas when one passenger unleashed a torrent of punches on another, in an attack captured in viral video, officials said Wednesday. In the latest incident of unruly passenger behavior, Phoenix-bound travelers were boarding Flight 117 at Love Field when a man in a tan blazer stood over a heavily tattooed man and started pummeling him, video footage showed. Moments earlier, the man in the blazer had approached the tattooed gentleman, asked for his address “and he actually gave him the address and then he just started punching him,” witness Caitlin Johnson, 32, told NBC News on Wednesday. Johnson, a speech language pathologist in Arizona who was just a few rows behind the chaos, said the tattooed man was seated and in no po...