Department of Justice Opens Criminal Investigation of Alaska Airlines Incident

A passenger flew back to Raleigh-Durham International Airport to help search for her dog that escaped after Alaska Airlines failed to put him on a flight to Seattle with her.

There's an interesting development, and potentially a negative one, to report from Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan. Alaska appears to be banning the use of other programs' loyalty numbers on award tickets when booked with Alaska Mileage Plan.

Southwest Airlines announced the return of its Companion Pass promotion. 

Airline executives are looking to meet with Boeing management, possibly as early as this week, to discuss safety concerns and production delays.

Although a federal judge dashed his hopes for a merger with JetBlue Airways, Spirit Airlines’ chief commercial officer still believes that more airline consolidation will come.

Your next hotel room stay may not be as secure as you hope it is.A group of security researchers who were invited to a Las Vegas hotel to identify digital security vulnerabilities discovered a technique that would enable intruders to open “millions of hotel rooms worldwide in seconds, with just two taps,” according to a new report from Wired.The team of security researchers, who spoke with Wired, have dubbed the hotel room keycard hacking technique “Unsaflok.”It is based on what Wired describes as “a collection of security vulnerabilities that would allow a hacker to almost instantly open several models of Saflok-brand RFID-based keycard locks sold by the Swiss lock maker Dormakaba.”More than 3 million hotel room doors around the globe, throughout 13,000 properties in 131 countries, use these types of Saflok systems, per Wired.Hackers are able to exploit weaknesses in keycard's encryption and underlying RFID system, the article goes on to explain.

Alaska Airlines just launched an unusual new subscription service that is going to require a $5-per-month payment to get early access to Alaska fare sales and a bit more. The Seattle-based airline is calling it "Alaska Access" and is saying it gives advanced alerts to some of its biggest sales of the year.

Recently, there was a viral tweet that posed an interesting question.

Wyndham Hotels & Resorts’ Women Own the Room initiative, which helps current and prospective women hotel owners break down historic barriers to hotel ownership, has celebrated fifteen hotel openings and over 50 signings in a little over two years. 

As part of its Nonstop to Net Zero effort, Southwest Airlines is signing on to a project that's been dubbed the Hawaii Seaglider Initiative.A new mode of transportation designed to combine the speed of an aircraft with the “relatively lower cost of a boat to reduce the time and cost” of transporting travelers, seagliders are all-electric, zero-emission vessels. They operate exclusively over water and can move at up to 180 miles-per-hour, which dramatically reduces travel time. Seagliders function by floating on their hull before transitioning to “wave-tolerant underwater hydrofoils” and then take flight at ultra-low altitudes about 30- to 60-feet above the surface of the water. The vessels are being designed by Rhode Island based manufacturer REGENT.The Hawaii Seaglider Initiative (HSI) was first announced in January and includes a broad coalition of partners. Some of the high-profile corporate and community partners supporting the effort include AES Hawaiʻi, Alaska Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines, Hawaii Building & Constructions Trades Council, Hawaiʻi Lodging and Tourism Association, Japan Airlines, Maui Hotel & Lodging Association, Mokulele Airlines, Molokaʻi Chamber of Commerce, Polynesian Adventure, and United Airlines.

After a spate of high-profile airline industry incidents, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby has issued a memo addressing safety concerns.In the memo Kirby said safety is the airline’s top priority, according to a report from The Points Guy.The airline CEO also discussed United’s own safety incidents, including acknowledging the airline has had “a number” of such incidents."While they are all unrelated, I want you to know that these incidents have our attention and have sharpened our focus," Kirby wrote, per The Points Guy. "Our team is reviewing the details of each case to understand what happened and using those insights to inform our safety training and procedures across all employee groups.”The memo from the CEO also indicates that United is working on rolling out a variety of new safety measures. Though Kirby also explained that the new safety upgrades were in the works before United’s recent spate of safety episodes. Some of the new measures the airline will be implementing include an extra day of training for pilots and new curriculum for maintenance technicians."I'm confident that we'll learn the right lessons from these recent incidents and continue to run an operation that puts safety first and makes our employees and customers proud," Kirby added.Kirby’s memo comes on the heels of a rocky few months for the airline industry as a whole. The most significant of which was the January 5 incident involving a Alaska Airlines’ Boeing 737 Max flight during which a door plug blew off after take-off and the plane was required to make an emergency landing.A handful of passengers who were on that Alaska Airlines flight have since filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Boeing, alleging negligence on the part of the plane manufacturer.As for United Airlines, one of its flights involving a 737 Max rolled off the runway at George W. Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston recently. Part of the plane’s landing gear collapsed as a result. That United incident followed a tire falling from a Boeing 777-200 plane (also flown by United) one day earlier.

Alaska Airlines CEO Ben Minicucci says the court ruling that blocked the Spirit-JetBlue merger has increased the chances that the Alaska-Hawaiian Airlines merger will receive approval.