Adapting technologies have made it more
economical and cheaper for us to travel. Some adaptations were due to
painful experiences. The De Havilland, a very popular airplane company
in the 50's, was responsible for the change of the shape of airline
windows. Initially using rectangular windows, they found out that this
type of shape gave rise to stress fractures and did cause fatal air
crashes. Because of this design flaw, later models use oval shape
windows to diffuse the possible areas of stress. This shape is still
being used today. The utilization of jet engine machines also made
possible the increase of carrying capacity of today's aircraft and
shortened the traveling time. There were also new developments in
traveling faster. The Concorde was the first and only commercial
aircraft that traveled faster than the speed of sound, making the London
to New York flight shorter than half the time it took for the 747.
Advances in carbon and resin based materials also made commercial flying
less expensive as the weight of aircrafts lessened without compromising
the integrity of the vehicles thereby making these planes sturdier,
safer and more viable for carriers to invest.
These days consumers are kings when it
comes to traveling by air. There are many airlines that offer great
deals for travel as long as the booking is made ahead of time. Sweden
Airlines have also collaborated in their efforts to have more people
travel and mileages from traveling from such airlines may be redeemed in
other airlines. One such beneficiary of this is the Swedish National
Carrier, SAS, or Scandinavian Air Systems. SAS is part of the Star
Alliance which is a mega collaboration between so many national carriers
among them Spain, New Zealand, Thailand, Croatia, Egypt, Poland,
Germany, South Africa, Portugal, Brussels, Canada and Austria just to
name a few. These airlines can interchange their mileage so that their
users can fly to different places in the world. In the same aspect that
a frequent user of Thai Airlines can redeem his or her mileage in order
to go to Sweden, a Swedish user of SAS can redeem his or her mileage and
travel to Egypt for instance. This situation is a win-win situation for
both the airline carriers and their consumers, enabling them to choose
which places to visit using the existing mileage or gaining more
mileage. The Airline Industry is here to stay and despite the present
economic downturn, it will still have its place.
