Category: Travel

(CNN) — Summer air travel has been trying, to put it mildly. Hellacious, many travelers would say.

About 55,000 flights have been canceled in the US since the Friday before Memorial Day, according to data from flight tracking site FlightAware, and nearly a quarter of US flights have been delayed this summer.

A “huge problem with staffing shortages” has plagued air travel this season and all of 2022 so far, said Kathleen Bangs, a former airline pilot and a spokesperson for FlightAware.

Bangs is inclined to give the airlines the benefit of the doubt in their efforts to ramp up pre-pandemic flight schedules with 2022 staffing challenges.

“I think they truly thought they would have enough employees return, and hire enough new ones, to meet the demand, but as we’ve all seen, they did not,” Bangs said.

Weather and air traffic controller staffing issues have added to the summer disruptions.

Financial worries may have bumped the pandemic as a top concern for travelers, but close to two-thirds of Americans still plan to hop on at least one overnight leisure trip in the upcoming three months — which includes the holiday season. Of those travelers, nearly half are planning to visit friends and relatives.

“Despite the challenges facing our industry, the outlook for fall looks stable,” said Erin Francis-Cummings, chief executive officer of Destination Analysts, in a livestreamed presentation of the latest quarterly State of the American Traveler report released Tuesday. The pre-holiday report and survey spans data collected from July through most of September.

A whopping 80% of US travelers confirm that they are excited about future trips, according to the report, with nearly a third saying they will take more leisure vacations in the next 12 months, compared to a year earlier.

That’s not to say that inflation hasn’t

Overture was designed by Boom Technology and aims to usher in a new era of supersonic travel by transporting passengers from places like New York City to London in only a few hours.

The world hasn’t seen commercial supersonic travel in nearly 20 years since the Concorde was retired in 2003, but all that is about to change with the development of a new, environmentally friendly airliner.

Meet Overture – the world’s fastest airliner that was developed by Denver-based Supersonic Boom.

HOW TO WATCH FOX WEATHER ON TV

With 26 million hours of designing and testing, Overture will run on 100% sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) as it flies at Mach 1.7 over the ocean, shuttling between 68-80 passengers up to nearly 5,000 miles.

The updated design features four engines that will keep weight and temperature balanced, which will also lower the size requirements of the wing-mounted engines.

Boom says that

• Whenever my five-person family travels, we try to save as much money as possible on flights.
• I use the Google Flights “explore” feature to browse deals for a variety of dates and destinations.
• Some airlines also offer cheaper rates at airport ticket counters than they do online.

Since my family of five plans on taking 22 trips this year, we have to stick to our budget.

One of the ways we save money is by finding great flight deals, so I’ve developed some tried-and-true strategies to make sure we book the least expensive fares possible.

Here’s how I found the most affordable flight options.

Try searching for deals on Google Flights

I’ve found almost all of our air-travel deals using Google Flights. The online flight-booking service is such a simple tool, but it allows us to find some great ticket prices.

Thanks to inexpensive rates we found

(CNN) — The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday moved three tropical island getaways and one Middle Eastern nation into its “moderate” risk category for Covid-19. There were no new additions to its “high” risk category this week.

Previously, Dutch Sint Maarten had been listed as “Unknown,” which happens when the CDC doesn’t have enough data to make a risk assessment. The other three places dropped down from “high” risk, or Level 3.

Just over half

An expectant Louisiana woman who was carrying a skull-less fetus that would die within a short time from birth ultimately traveled about 1,400 miles to New York City to terminate her pregnancy after her local hospital denied her an abortion amid uncertainty over the procedure’s legality.

Nancy Davis, 36, told the Guardian that she had her pregnancy terminated on September 1 after traveling from her home town of Baton Rouge to a clinic in Manhattan whose staff had agreed to complete the procedure.

Davis’s trek was necessary because Louisiana has outlawed abortion with very few exceptions after the US supreme court’s decision in June to eliminate federal abortion rights which were established by its 1973 Roe v Wade ruling. New York is among the states where abortion remains legal.

Davis was about 10 weeks pregnant in late July when an ultrasound at Woman’s hospital in Baton Rouge – Louisiana’s capital