Advertiser Disclosure: Eye of the Flyer, a division of Chatterbox Entertainment, Inc., is part of an affiliate sales network and and may earn compensation when a customer clicks on a link, when an application is approved, or when an account is opened. This relationship may impact how and where links appear on this site. This site does not include all financial companies or all available financial offers. Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed, or approved by any of these entities. Some links on this page are affiliate or referral links. We may receive a commission or referral bonus for purchases or successful applications made during shopping sessions or signups initiated from clicking those links. The content on this page is accurate as of the posting date; however, some of the offers mentioned may have expired.
Here are this week’s travel news headlines from around the web and interweb I found the most interesting. Take a look:
This one is almost certainly AI-generated, but as an AvGeek it made me smile anyway. The video shows a small private jet sitting on the runway in front of a massive 747, with the tiny jet getting some attitude over the radio about how it’ll be airborne before the “fatty” even gets its wheels up. The 747 isn’t having it, firing back about engine size and who’s really creating the mess. Air traffic control eventually has to step in just to tell them both to knock it off. Fake or not, the size joke between a little private jet and a jumbo widebody never stops being funny to me.
Mooney International, a Texas-based company, says it has formally submitted a bid to acquire Spirit Airlines and its related assets as Spirit continues winding down operations after its bailout effort fell short earlier this year. The company says its goal isn’t just to pick over the carcass, but to “preserve the Spirit Airlines legacy” while building something new focused on operational excellence and expanded route connectivity. No financial terms or timeline have been disclosed, and it’s unclear if other bidders are circling the same assets or what regulatory hurdles would need to be cleared. Spirit’s slow-motion collapse has been one of the more painful storylines in aviation over the past two years, so any serious attempt to bring some version of it back from the dead is worth watching.
Back in July 2024, a botched CrowdStrike software update crashed Delta’s crew-scheduling systems and led to thousands of canceled flights over multiple days, stranding hundreds of thousands of passengers. The DOT opened an investigation after then-Secretary Pete Buttigieg called Delta’s response “unacceptable,” citing eight-hour phone hold times and understaffed airport counters. This week, Politico reported that the DOT closed the investigation with no punishment for Delta at all, with a spokesperson saying the airline “ensured passengers received prompt refunds and baggage assistance.” Worth noting that Southwest got hit with a $140 million fine for a similar meltdown just months earlier. Same industry, same type of failure, very different outcomes.
My fellow BoardingArea blogger Gary over at View from the Wing has an absolutely wild one this week. A family transferred Capital One points into Flying Blue and booked four confirmed award tickets on Virgin Atlantic. Air France canceled them within a minute. They rebooked, got canceled again. They tried a workaround using family pooling, and the tickets held for several days, through check-in, through boarding passes, right up until departure day, when Air France canceled them a third time. The family ended up paying over $8,300 out of pocket for last-minute replacement tickets. Here’s the kicker: Air France accidentally forwarded its own internal emails to the customer, which showed staff couldn’t agree on why the tickets were even canceled in the first place, eventually settling on an unsubstantiated “miles resale” claim invented after the fact. This is a genuinely fascinating, infuriating read if you transfer points to partner programs the way I do.
On Sweden’s National Day, Koenigsegg test driver Markus Lundh took the Jesko Absolut out and absolutely demolished two records at once: an 8.54 second quarter-mile at 190 mph, the first time any production car has cracked 300 km/h in the quarter, and a half-mile run of 232 mph in 12.76 seconds. What makes this even wilder is how it pulled it off, rear-wheel drive only, regular production tires, on an unprepped runway, no fancy launch tricks. And Koenigsegg is pushing the performance software update to every existing Jesko Absolut owner over the air, so current owners are about to get faster without lifting a wrench. There is video of the run and you genuinely have to watch it to believe those numbers.
Lukas Sjoman spent 200 days building Helios 11, a yacht that runs entirely on sunlight with no need to ever stop for fuel. His latest trip, documented on his YouTube channel TRUE NORTH, took him over 3,000 miles from Finland all the way to Ibiza. It wasn’t smooth sailing the whole way. His utility dinghy was stolen while anchored in Spain, forcing the crew to build an emergency catamaran out of foam and wood just to get to shore, and vandals later threw rocks at the boat from a bridge, with one rock actually striking the solar panel setup. Remarkably, the solar output was unaffected. He made it to Ibiza in one piece and, as you’d imagine, earned himself a well-deserved break.
Grant Haefner flew from Cincinnati to Morocco for his first-ever Asian Tour start at the $2 million International Series Morocco, and his clubs simply never showed up. He spent two hours at the Royal Air Maroc baggage desk with no luck, then had to borrow a driver from one player, irons from another, and a putter from an emergency loaner kit he wasn’t thrilled about. “The clubs were so bad for me,” he said. When his bag still hadn’t turned up by round two, the Asian Tour Commissioner himself, Cho Minn Thant, lent Haefner his own personal set before flying home. Despite all that, Haefner is sitting at 6-under through two rounds and very much in contention. This isn’t even a rare problem either; LPGA stars Charley Hull and Nelly Korda have both dealt with lost golf bags from airlines in recent years.
A Larimer County deputy spotted a black Ford sedan flying down I-25 at 130 mph in a 75 mph zone on the night of May 30. Things escalated fast: the driver took an exit while still doing roughly 100 mph, killed the headlights to try to vanish into the dark, and ran a red light before deputies finally got him stopped. What they found inside was something else entirely. The car had a signal jammer, a license plate cover, the ability to kill every light on the vehicle at once, and modifications to make it resemble a police cruiser. The driver, Greg Barclay, has reported ties to the Cannonball Run community, the infamous illegal cross-country race, though this particular run wasn’t part of an actual attempt. Both Barclay and his passenger were arrested. This is the kind of car build you’d expect in a movie, not on a random Friday night in northern Colorado.
Back in 2022, Delta announced plans to outfit a fleet of A321neo aircraft with reverse herringbone lie-flat business class seats from Safran SA for its premium transcontinental routes. It was a genuinely exciting promise. Then the seats kept failing FAA safety certification tests. And kept failing. One plane was built with the new cabin in 2024 and immediately put into storage, where it sat for over a year collecting dust. That’s actually why the current 44-seat domestic First Class A321neos exist, Delta needed a stopgap to get those planes flying while it waited for an approval that never came. Now Delta has apparently had enough. Chief Marketing Officer Ranjan Goswami told Bloomberg the airline is now pitting a new supplier, Thompson Aero Seating, against Safran to see who can get FAA approval first, with the target pushed back to 2028 at the earliest. That’s four-plus years after the original promise. As someone who follows Delta closely, this is a real disappointment. Instead, passengers on those routes will keep waiting.
Vietnam pulled in over 21 million visitors in 2025, a 20% jump from the year before, and has now surpassed Thailand as the top destination for Chinese tourists. The government is targeting $41 billion in tourism revenue this year and is investing aggressively in infrastructure, including over $830 million for a new airport in Phu Quoc ahead of the 2027 APEC Summit. What’s interesting is Vietnam’s deliberate strategy to attract higher-spending business, luxury, and medical travelers rather than backpackers, while watching Thailand’s overtourism struggles as a cautionary tale. Vietjet is expanding internationally too, with new routes from China, Japan, and Singapore, and possibly Europe down the line. If you haven’t put Vietnam on your radar yet, this might be the year to start.
Were there any crazy or interesting travel news stories you found interesting that I missed? If so please drop a comment below and include a link to the story! – René
Advertiser Disclosure: Eye of the Flyer, a division of Chatterbox Entertainment, Inc., is part of an affiliate sales network and and may earn compensation when a customer clicks on a link, when an application is approved, or when an account is opened. This relationship may impact how and where links appear on this site. This site does not include all financial companies or all available financial offers. Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed, or approved by any of these entities. Some links on this page are affiliate or referral links. We may receive a commission or referral bonus for purchases or successful applications made during shopping sessions or signups initiated from clicking those links.
