Float to live Can you float on your back in a starfish shape, chin back, chest pushed skywards? Almost everyone can. “Float to live” reduces the accelerated heart rate and panicked breathing we suffer when we find ourselves in difficulty in water, including the effects of cold water shock. Thrashing around and taking in water is a recipe for disaster, whereas floating on your back buys you vital time in which to decide whether to signal for help or try to swim ashore, says the Royal National Lifeboat Institution’s (RNLI) head of water safety, Gareth Morrison. He mentions the story of a 10-year-old boy rescued by the charity’s Scarborough Lifeboat in 2020 – he had been swept out to sea, but knew about float to live. “He floated for nearly an hour before rescuers reached him, which saved his life.” If you find yourself in the situation where you need to float to live, Morrison advises you tilt your head back with ears submerged, relax and try to control your breathing, and use your hands to help you stay afloat. “It’s OK if your legs sink, we all float differently,” he says.
European Low-Fare Lines Target U.S. This Summer
27.07.2023 - 18:47 / smartertravel.com
North American travelers looking for bargain transatlantic fares will have lots more options this summer, as European-based low-fare lines expand their reach. Three lines have announced aggressive moves:
Norwegian will add flights to Boston from London/Gatwick, Copenhagen, and Oslo, along with flights to Ft. Lauderdale, Los Angeles, and New York/JFK from a new base at Paris/Orly. These flights will use Norwegian’s new 787s with conventional economy and better-than-average premium economy service. Sample round-trip fares for mid-August from Boston to London range from $726 for a nonrefundable economy ticket to $1,301 in premium economy. For comparison, British Airways posts $1,271 for Boston-London economy round-trips and $2,005 for premium economy at the same time. Although Norwegians’ base fare looks low, fees are high: $65 each way for one checked bag, $12 to $16 each way for advance seat assignment, $40 for meals, and comparably stiff prices for beverages would bring the total to somewhere near $1,000 for most travelers. Its premium economy deal, however, includes checked bags and meals and is therefore a considerably better deal than BA’s premium economy.
Norwegian’s other proposal is more of a puzzlement: Nonstops from Cork, Ireland, to Boston, using narrow-body 737s, pending U.S. government approval. Certainly, that’s technically feasible, but Cork seems an odd choice, at least for now: Currently, Norwegian does not fly to Cork at all, so no onward connections would be available. Meanwhile, Norwegian will continue its established services from various U.S. points to Scandinavia, including Bergen.
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WOW Air, the new Icelandic low-fare line, will fly this summer from Baltimore, Boston, Los Angeles, Montreal, San Francisco, and Toronto to Reykjavik, where you can catch a connecting flight to any of 17 important European cities. Wow’s apparent plan, to make Reykjavik become something of the Atlantic equivalent of Dubai, seems feasible. Outside of the New York area, other big U.S. cities generally enjoy nonstop flights just to London, and maybe Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and Paris. But if you want to fly from, say, Los Angeles to Berlin, you have to change to a connecting flight somewhere, and Reykjavik is probably a lot more user-friendly than JFK, Heathrow, Frankfurt, or De Gaulle.
Wow’s plan will probably work out well from its East Coast points. It flies A321s and can adjust capacity to demand quickly, but the West Coast is something of a gamble. Wow bought three 340-seat A330s for those trips, and filling up all those seats, even if only twice a week, may be tough.
Wow consistently draws a lot of press with its occasional $99 fare sales. Right now it’s
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