As I entered the cabin on the upper deck the flight steward took my ticket and bags and walked me to my suite. It is not fair to call it a seat because it is so much more than that.

I lowered myself into the leather chair that is about as wide and as comfortable as my lounge at home. There is more room here than even my larger-than-average sized backside needs. To help ease any pre-flight tension I’m handed a glass of vintage Dom Perignon. The year 2000 I think.

First class return flights between Sydney and Dubai on the A380 are $13,450 plus taxes of $120.

Don’t miss the amazing photo gallery.

The Transportation Security Administration…has on its Web site a “mythbuster” that tries to reassure the public.

Myth: The No-Fly list includes an 8-year-old boy.

Buster: No 8-year-old is on a T.S.A. watch list.

“Meet Mikey Hicks,” said Najlah Feanny Hicks, introducing her 8-year-old son, a New Jersey Cub Scout and frequent traveler who has seldom boarded a plane without a hassle because he shares the name of a suspicious person. “It’s not a myth.”

Michael Winston Hicks’s mother initially sensed trouble when he was a baby and she could not get a seat for him on their flight to Florida at an airport kiosk; airline officials explained that his name “was on the list,” she recalled.

The first time he was patted down, at Newark Liberty International Airport, Mikey was 2. He cried.

After years of long delays and waits for supervisors at every airport ticket counter, this year’s vacation to the Bahamas badly shook up the family. Mikey was frisked on the way there, then more aggressively on the way home.

“Up your arms, down your arms, up your crotch — someone is patting your 8-year-old down like he’s a criminal,” Mrs. Hicks recounted. “A terrorist can blow his underwear up and they don’t catch him. But my 8-year-old can’t walk through security without being frisked…”

On the way home last Friday, Mikey’s boarding pass showed four giant red S’s at the airport in Nassau. “Oh, random screening,” Mrs. Hicks said…Mrs. Hicks said she wanted to take pictures of her son being frisked but was told it was against the rules.

The worst kind of bureaucrat is the robot whose artificial brain can’t see beyond obeying “The Rules”. There is nothing more important in their diminutive lives than The List.

POW Escapes is a “Reality Tourism” experience. A World War Two prisoner of war camp of the type operated by the German Luftwaffe in World War Two has been recreated near Warsaw in Poland, and our goal is give people the chance to experience what it was like for Prisoners of War in these “Stalag Luft” camps. Everything in and around the camp has been faithfully recreated in consultation with experts and veterans.

Lest anyone think this might be in bad taste:

POW Escapes does not support, condone or endorse the actions of the Nazis or any other extremist political or racist organization past or present.

“I order you to have fun!”

Pompeii was destroyed by the volcano Vesuvius in 79AD. There is evidence to suggest the volcano will massively erupt again fairly soon and potentially wipe out the the area southwest of it where 2 million people live, including the neighboring city of Naples.

Giuseppe Fiorelli took charge of the excavations in 1860. During early excavations of the site, occasional voids in the ash layer had been found that contained human remains. It was Fiorelli who realized these were spaces left by the decomposed bodies and so devised the technique of injecting plaster into them to perfectly recreate the forms of Vesuvius’s victims. What resulted were highly accurate and eerie forms of the doomed Pompeiani who failed to escape, in their last moment of life, with the expression of terror often quite clearly visible

Air travelers in the United States are already paying for sandwiches and drinks, pillows and headsets. So, as airlines look for more ways to help their bottom lines, they have started asking the next logical question: Why not sell limousine services or even tickets to Broadway shows?
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Other airlines declined to talk on the record about their plans, but nearly all the major carriers acknowledged that they were working on expanding retail offerings.
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“Look at what’s going on in airports,” he said. “Anytime you have customers who are captive, who have nothing better to do, they’ll shop.”

The technology making the onboard sales possible is being provided by GuestLogix, a Canadian company that sells the credit card readers and sales software to the airline industry. A brochure promoting its products describes onboard retail as unique because “operators are able to lock their doors with their shoppers still inside.”

In an interview, Brett Proud executive vice president of global sales and client support for GuestLogix, described the jetliner as “a retail space that is probably the biggest retail opportunity ever uncovered,” adding, “It’s huge.”