If we had tried a bit harder we probably could have come up with an awesome way to run the show this week in honor of the Kentucky Derby. Instead all I did was manage to include the bugler’s call to post at one point in the middle of the show. We’re certainly not the fastest 2 minutes in points & travel podcasting but I think we’re some of the more entertaining 40ish minutes every other week. And so, without further ado, this week’s episode. Amongst the topics covered:

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• British Airways awards using US Airways Miles have been issuing without fuel surcharges. And US has a 100% buy bonus on miles going on again. No idea if it’ll still be live when the episode finally posts, but it has been since the oneworld switchover. Oops.
  
• ATC near LA got hosed last Friday. Now it seems that a U-2 plane flying over the area may have been involved. We’ve got some excellent conspiracy theories to share on that front. (Confirmed by the FAA after we recorded. Also, I said 8-bit unsigned integer would overflow above 65k feet but it would actually be a 16-bit unsigned integer; sorry my binary math wasn’t so great. And this guy also says it was a buffer overflow.)
  
• Seth’s took an afternoon to fly around the Seattle area on Kenmore Air’s Seaplanes. Highly recommended.
  
• Korean Air launched service to Houston which is great if you live there. Interestingly, that seems to have been enough to drive Stephan to leave town in search of better dots and lines in the Pacific Northwest.
  
• United’s crappy performance in Q1 has some pilots calling for Smisek’s removal. We talk about why we think they suck so much and also why Delta is doing so well. It might have something to do with Deltas’ much better reliability.
  
• Turkish is starting flights to Asmara, Eritrea via Taif, Saudi Arabia. We like chasing dots and lines more than most but that route is going to be relatively low on the list for us.
  

Turkish Airlines to start 3 weekly Asmara service via Taif, Saudi Arabia. Boeing 737-800 operates the service from 19AUG14

— airlineroute (@airlineroute) May 3, 2014

Who wants these awesome lines??

Map generated by the Great Circle Mapper - copyright © Karl L. Swartz.

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• Frontier added two new routes out of Wilmington, Delaware last week. Seth was on the inaugurals.
  

All that and more this time around. Enjoy the show.

You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or to the podcast feed.

• DLD51: I really just don’t know
• DLD 58: Adventures in IROPS
• DLD56: Goooooooaaaaaaaalllllll!