American Airlines

After a three-year hiatus, airlines are bringing back wireless Internet service on planes, allowing business travelers to check their e-mails, browse the Web and log into their corporate networks while in flight. There hasn't been in-flight Internet access since Boeing Co. killed a very expensive, multibillion-dollar project to wire planes all over the world with a satellite-based system.

Seven dollars for a pillow and blanket on JetBlue. Twenty-five dollars to book a flight by phone or in person with Delta. Twenty-five dollars to send an unaccompanied minor on Southwest. Airlines are requiring fees of all kinds. And now comes a charge that the airlines hope won't make you cringe: an in-flight wireless Internet connection fee. The race is on among the nation's largest airlines to install the circuitry that lets passengers go wireless while jetting 35,000 feet above the ground.

Southwest Airlines Co., AMR Corp.'s American Airlines and 20 other U.S. carriers will see the fees they pay the government for screening passengers reduced after an appeals court ruled that a regulator overstepped its authority. The court in Washington found Tuesday that although the fees were proper, the Transportation Security Administration erred when it included the cost of screening nonpassengers in implementing the Aviation and Transportation Security Act.

American Airlines failed to catch repeated errors by mechanics before a September 2007 flight that made an emergency landing after one of its engines caught fire during departure. The 143 people aboard the flight from St. Louis weren't hurt, but the incident could have been catastrophic because of additional mistakes by the flight crew, members of the National Transportation Safety Board said Tuesday.

Airlines are flying some nearly empty planes from the U.S. to Mexico, a sign that swine flu worries may be keeping travelers home. Travelers had reserved fewer than half the available seats on six Continental Airlines flights Wednesday night, according to the airline's website. Only five travelers had reserved any of the 157 available seats on one flight from Houston to Cancun, Mexico, set to depart Wednesday night. Twenty minutes before a Continental flight was set to leave Newark, N.J.

Flexible miles American Airlines is letting its 60 million-plus AAdvantage members book award travel on a one-way basis. Each one-way segment can be booked for half the miles of a round-trip award. American is not the first airline to do this. Alaska Airlines, for instance, allows mix-and-match awards. But American is by far the biggest.

The annual survey of frequent fliers by Seatguru.com, the popular online guide to airline seating, doesn't have a lot of highlights for U.S.-based airlines. U.S. carriers serve the worst food -- if they serve food at all, that is -- and have the least comfortable seats, the survey of 1,600 fliers found. Meals on American Airlines, United Airlines and US Airways were considered the worst of the bunch. The best?

On June 9, the front page of this newspaper carried a photograph of a red, white and blue object floating, like some sort of gaily colored raft, in a blue-black ocean. To pilots, it brought a chilling sense of deja vu. In November 2001, a similarly shaped and colored object floated in Jamaica Bay, just off Long Island. It was the vertical stabilizer -- colloquially, the "tail fin" -- of an American Airlines Airbus, Flight 587, that had broken up shortly after taking off from JFK.

Anne Wexler, a well-connected political power broker who founded the first major Washington lobbying firm to be led by a woman and who was considered one of the capital's most influential lobbyists, died Friday of cancer at her home in Washington. She was 79. Wexler began her unlikely rise in Democratic Party circles as a Connecticut housewife who joined the PTA and a local zoning board. By 1978, she had carved out an important role in the Carter White House and used her skills at compromise and negotiation to win support on Capitol Hill for the administration's agenda.

Eight major airlines have agreed to use renewable synthetic diesel fuel for their ground service equipment at Los Angeles International Airport starting in 2012. Rentech Inc. of Los Angeles will sell as much as 1.5 million gallons each year of its RenDiesel fuel to Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Continental Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines, United Airlines, UPS Airlines and US Airways. The airlines are all members of the Air Transport Assn. of America Inc., which announced the deal Tuesday along with Rentech.