Natasha Frost

Jet fuel smells like itself: oil, chemicals, potential. In a glass, it resembles vodka, or sometimes a pale tequila. It is less heavy than water, cheaper by weight than milk, and harder to set alight with a flaming match than ethanol. Where kerosene is more refined than diesel, so jet fuel is more refined than kerosene. For chemists, it is a jumble of Cs and Hs, and the occasional sulfurous S; for mechanics, it is something to avoid splashing on your skin. For the aviation industry, it is a puzzle. 

We don’t like the dry air. We don’t like the food (and we especially don’t like it when it runs out, and we don’t get to choose). We don’t like the grubby toilets. We don’t like queueing to get on (or off). We don’t like the plane’s roar as we’re trying to sleep. We don’t like having to fight for the overhead cabins. We don’t like the intermittent wifi. We don’t like the bumps of unexpected turbulence. We don’t like the chairs. We definitely don’t like how much all this ignominy and discomfort costs.

For almost three decades, Derek Kerr, the chief financial officer of American Airlines, has been deep in the financial details of US airlines.

For decades, airplanes powered by oil have transported huge numbers of passengers from one place to another, particularly in the developed world. The industry has faced its fair share of challenges over those years—deregulation; bigger, then smaller planes; computer-armed customers shopping for the cheapest tickets; carrier consolidation—but the broader picture has always been the same: big bird, big crowd, Big Oil. 

Technically speaking, lot 20 in British auctioneer Bonham’s Bonmont Sale of motor vehicles was an off-white, used car.

The people have gone without for much too long.

After 178 years, UK travel company Thomas Cook this week announced its bankruptcy and liquidation, plunging more than 150,000 travelers into chaos and uncertainty.

The 45th season of Saturday Night Live, which premiered last night (Sept. 28), will not be pulling its punches.

US plane manufacturer Boeing and its European nemesis, Airbus, are in hot water after the World Trade Organization last week found that both received billions of dollars in illegal subsidies over the past 15 years, including cheap government loans and state tax credits.

E-cigarettes, long touted as a healthier way to move off the original cancer sticks, suddenly face an alarming bad rap: mysterious lung diseases; random explosions during use; a link with cancer and heart disease.

New sexual misconduct allegations about Brett Kavanaugh have reignited calls for the US Supreme Court Justice to be impeached. In a new book excerpted in the New York Times today, reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly investigated claims made by Deborah Ramirez, a classmate of Kavanaugh’s at Yale.

Dozens of demonstrators were arrested this weekend at Microsoft’s Fifth Avenue store in New York. The sit-in, according the “Close the Camps NYC” organization that coordinated it, was in opposition of the company’s contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the US government agency responsible for deporting undocumented migrants and keeping migrant children in cages at the US border.

Emotional support animals come in all shapes and sizes—as large and ostentatious as a miniature horse or full-sized peacock, or as unobtrusive as a well-trained guinea pig. Some offer support via timely yaps, others by quiet companionship. Some are friends to all, others take their work too seriously to bother with strangers.

The only thing standing between you and a Cook Islands vacation is a flight.

On Sunday night, Hurricane Dorian slammed into the northwestern Bahamas, wreaking devastation over the islands, coupled with gusts of more than 220 miles per hour. The storm, now at Category 4 intensity, has moved slowly over the archipelago, with a sustained pause over Grand Bahama Island.

For the vast majority of people, ragweed is little more than a green and yellow shrub. But for about 10% of the US population, the plant is a one-way ticket to weeks of misery: a runny nose, streaming eyes, and even hives. The more plants there are, the worse the reaction.

In 1540, the French wine-making region of Burgundy experienced a summer so hot and dry that the grapes withered on the vine. The resulting pour, according to contemporary reports, “yielded a sweet sherry-like wine which made people rapidly drunk.” English wine critic Hugh Johnson, who tasted a German wine from the same vintage, described it as “extraordinary.”

It’s a familiar ritual: Ahead of a serve, a tennis player will be brought two, three, or even four balls by a waiting ball boy or ball girl. One by one, the player will test out each ball—perhaps by bouncing it off the floor or on the racket, or cupping it in their hands. Any balls found wanting will be chucked away, while the ones deemed acceptable are duly thrown into the air and walloped across the net.

If you took a trip to Georgia in the last few years, you probably have a reasonably good idea of why. It might have been the call of the historic capital, Tbilisi, all ramshackle red roofs and fairytale castles, or on the strength of a rumor about the greatest wine scene you’d never heard of. Perhaps you read a honeyed New Yorker story about a seductive, herb-flecked cuisine, or saw the country on travel listicle after travel listicle—the New York Times, the Financial Times (paywall), CNN, National Geographic—and concluded that it was having a moment, and you wanted in. Perhaps it was little more than a cheap flight and a well-timed Instagram post.

In 2018, Chinese tourists made nearly 150 million trips around the world, spending a colossal $277 billion. More than $36 billion, or about 13% of that sum, was spent in the US, with Chinese visitors spending it up in Hawaii, Hollywood, and other big-ticket US destinations.

Nearly 6.4 million people came to the United States on a B visa in 2017. This common visa type—B-1, for business travel; B-2, for tourism; or the combo B-1/B-2, for a bit of both—is issued for short-term travel to the US. If you plan to attend business meetings or conferences, spend a week on vacation in Hawaii or Florida, or visit family in the US, this is the visa you’re likely to need.

If all goes to plan, you might be able to make an uninterrupted, 20-hour flight from London or New York to Sydney as soon as October. Qantas, the Australian national airline, is trialing “ghost flights” with 40 passengers and crew.

In his 2018 end-of-year letter to Norwegian Air shareholders, co-founder and then-CEO Bjørn Kjos made some bold predictions for his low-cost, long-haul airline. “This past year has marked a peak in the company’s growth,” he wrote. “We are now entering a new phase where there will be a clear return from our investments. The key priority for the entire organization is returning to profitability.”

You have eaten precisely the same kind of banana hundreds, likely thousands, of times before. Sometimes it has been comically large; at others, helpfully palm-sized for convenient snacking. Riper or greener, bashed around in transit or fresh from the market, in sickness or in health—from a genetic perspective, it’s been the same old banana time after time after time. And that’s a problem.