Airlines, United Airlines | featured news

If Kerry Drake missed his connecting flight, he wouldn't get to the hospital in time to say goodbye to his mother. Drake got the news on the morning of January 24 that his mother, who had been ill for years from rheumatoid arthritis and had been especially sick the last four months, was dying.

Just four days into the new year, United Airlines launched the first attempted airfare increase of 2013. The move is in line with travel experts' predictions that fliers, in general, will face a tougher atmosphere this year.

Airline passengers can already get online 30,000 feet over Oklahoma. Soon U.S. airlines will offer Internet connections over the ocean, too. United, Delta, and American — the nation's three biggest airlines — said Wednesday that they're within weeks of having their first international flights with Internet service.

United Airlines says it has fixed a computer problem that led to widespread delays for thousands of its passengers. The outage lasted for about two hours Thursday morning. The problem was that dispatchers couldn't send flight information to about half of the United's mainline flights.

United Airlines says Superstorm Sandy cut its October revenue by about $90 million as it was forced to cancel almost 5,300 flights.

This weekend, the Continental-United merger is expected to hit a significant milestone that both airlines hope travelers won’t even notice.

United Airlines flew the first U.S. commercial passengers Monday on a Boeing 737-824 powered partly with Honeywell biofuel made from algae, a Honeywell subsidiary announced. Flight 1403, scheduled to arrive in Chicago's O'Hare airport at 1:00 p.m. CST from Houston, used a blend of petroleum-based jet fuel and aviation biofuel made from algal-oil, provided by Solazyme, according to Honeywell's UOP.

United Continental Holdings, Inc. is about to take on Delta, Virgin America and JetBlue in a major way. Despite being later than some to the in-flight Wi-Fi game, the merged United and Continental partnership will soon sprout internet in the skies. Panasonic Avionics Corporation has been chosen to provide Wi-Fi connectivity on more than 300 United Airlines and Continental Airlines mainline aircraft beginning in mid-2012. Panasonic's Ku-band satellite technology offers faster speed than air-to-ground technology (ATG) and will provide connectivity on flights worldwide. The system will also enable wireless streaming of video content.

United and Continental are the latest airlines to ditch heavy paper flight manuals for iPads.

United Airlines worked to resume normal flight operations after resolving a computer outage but flight departures were expected to be delayed throughout the weekend, the company said on Saturday.