Pilot Attrition Critical at Largest Amazon Carrier

For nearly three-and-a-half-years, the pilots of Wilmington, Ohio-based Air Transport International (ATI), as represented by the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), have been mired in unproductive negotiations with the air-carrier’s management. In March 2023—compelled by a protracted stalemate occasioned by management’s obstinance vis-à-vis big-ticket issues the likes of compensation and retirement packages—both parties filed for mediation with the U.S. National Mediation Board (NMB). The last scheduled NMB session of 2023 will be held in Baltimore, Maryland and span 24 through 26 October.

Shiko Your Booty; or, It All Comes Out In the Mawashi

Japanese flagship air-carrier Japan Airlines (JAL) recently found itself uncomfortably middled between national pride and the immutable principles of physics to which aircraft operations are immutably beholden. On 12 October, JAL was forced to add an extra domestic flight for purpose of accommodating a sizable group of sumo wrestlers traveling to attend the Special National Sports Festival on Amami Oshima Island in Japan’s southern Kagoshima Prefecture. All told, 27 wrestlers, known in Japanese as rikishi, a term translating, more or less, to men of strength, had been booked to travel in two groups aboard a pair of JAL Boeing 737-800s—narrow-body jets with cabin ca