Yes, you get irradiated, but it would take 1,000 airport scans a year to equal the radiation you’d get from one chest x-ray, according to the American College of Radiology. The TSA blog has more fascinating facts about full-body scanners.

The whole idea still creeps me out, but now that they’ve landed in Boston, I’m sure I’ll be getting the full-body scan sometime in the very near future.

I think of myself as being pretty travel-savvy, but there are some travel scams in this article I hadn’t heard of before: Top 10 Worst Travel Scams.

Thanks to Andrea Gold on the MeCo listserv for the pointer!

We should have seen this one coming: Now facing potential fines of up to $27,500 per passenger for planes that end up waiting on the runway for more than three hours, some airlines say they’d rather cancel flights. Of course they would, at $5 million for a full 757, that’s a lot of cash per plane in delay fees (the article doesn’t say how much a cancellation would cost).

There has to be a better solution. Such as, maybe, “doing a better job of scheduling flights and crews,” as a U.S. Transportation Department spokesman suggested in the article?

Even though Up in the Air didn’t score big in the Oscars, the road warriors mindset it portrays is one that pretty much every meeting manager can relate to. But when I read this editorial in yesterday’s Boston Globe, I thought it might be going a bit too far to actually praise jet lag. But who could argue with this sentiment?

“My own theory is that jet lag begins not in midair but the moment one sets foot in the airport. Checking in, passing through security, drifting toward the departure gate - all stages in a glorious slippage of identity. As you hover along the concourse, eyes a-flicker, your tastes and habits fall away. You are between states, between countries: Unwonted pleasures recommend themselves. You buy an expensive magazine about cars, despite having no interest in cars. At 9:30 in the morning you find yourself eating a plate of General Gao’s chicken. Who are you?”

Been there, done that. I think author James Parker is right after all — we should embrace it all as part of the human experience. Or something. Anyway, it’s a great read.

Update: I should have known this was too juicy to be true. Here’s the real scoop from the TSA blog. Thanks, Jim, for the update.

If you’re Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, you sign autographs on them. At least that’s what happened when he found people holding copies of the scans of his body taken with one of the new full-body scanners at London’s Heathrow, according to Yahoo India News. From the article:

Khan said he did not know that the body-scans - installed in the wake of last year’s abortive Christmas Day bombing of a transatlantic flight over Detroit - showed up every little detail of one’s body…

‘Then I saw these girls - they had these printouts. I looked at them. I thought they were some forms you had to fill. I said ‘give them to me’ - and you could see everything inside. So I autographed them for them.’

He’s a way better sport than I would have been.

Click on the photo to enlarge it, then tell me — is this not the best airplane paint job ever? It’s brought to you by Kulula, South Africa’s low-cost airline. (Thanks to Chris Rawlinson!)

Some headlines that caught my eye this morning:

IATA: Airline industry will take at least 3 years to recover

Canada eases carry-on restrictions

Air France may give obese passengers a break

And last, but certainly not least: London’s newest tourist attraction - ABBAWORLD

Royal Caribbean is taking a lot of heat over its decision to continue to bring passengers to its private beach at Labadee, about 100 miles up the coast from earthquake-shattered Port-au-Prince. Never mind that it donated a million bucks to the relief efforts, and is bringing in aide and supplies along with passengers — to most, it may look like, as David Letterman, said, something only “idiot cruise ships” would do. But it’s not so simple to deride the decision if you look beyond the first gut reaction.

I think that Royal Caribbean is doing the best it can under horrible circumstances; it’s just that we’re all really uncomfortable about it. Personally, there’s no way I could sip a rum drink knowing about the devastation just down the coast — just as I couldn’t go enjoy being in New York for a long time after 9/11 or New Orleans while the worst of the post-Katrina nightmare was still going on. Being in close proximity to so much suffering precludes good times for most of us, even as the local NY and NOLA CVBs begged us to bring our tourist and meetings dollars to the area so business as somewhat usual can resume and people can have some sense of normalcy again (and a cash-flow source, of course). Haiti, of course, is not a major meetings or tourism destination in the same way New Orleans or New York are, but there are some parallels to be drawn.

Then there was this quote in a Miami Herald story a poster on the Miforum listserv pointed out:

Arthur Applbaum, a Harvard University professor of ethics and public policy, said that while it shows “moral sensitivity to be disturbed by the thought that one is vacationing on the beach when others are suffering nearby … it also shows insufficient moral reflection to think that proximity makes a moral difference.

“The people of Haiti are suffering whether you take your beach vacation in the Dominican Republic or in Hawaii,” he said, “and it is a failure of the moral imagination not to be equally troubled in Waikiki.”

I have a failure of moral imagination then, because to me, there is a difference — even if I can’t articulate what exactly it is. I still think RCCL is doing the best thing it can in a terrible situation: bringing continuity to the people who depend on its passengers for their livelihood, along with aide and funds. I just would not be able to stomach being one of the passengers, not now. If that makes me a hypocrite, so be it.

For a first-person account of what being a passenger on a recent stop in Labadee was like, check out this post: Cruise with a Purpose. Granted, coming from an executive with cruising company Seasite.com may give it a bit of a positive spin, but I have a feeling she speaks for how most of the passengers probably felt about the experience.

The best session I went to at PCMA yesterday was by far the Masters Series session featuring Gerard Arpey of American Airlines and Gary Kelly of Southwest. Moderated by Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert, it started off a little slow with some kind of “duh” questions about their feelings on the past 18 months of skyrocketing fuel costs, a spiraling economy, etc. I mean, it’s been bad for all of us, including the airlines. Not surprisingly, both think we’re doing the best we can to combat terrorism, and appear to be in favor of full-body scanners and the use of technology to find terrorists at the terminal (they didn’t go into other aspects of anti-terrorism efforts or security issues that reach beyond the airport per se).

But it picked up and got really interesting once they started talking about how to handle future rises (more fees?), the airlines’ carbon footprint and what they can/can’t do to reduce it, the airline industry’s need for a new air traffic control system and their outrage the the economic stimulous package included “not one dollar” to update this antiquated system developed in the 1950s and still dependent on that era’s technology.

Kelly said there were three things that would make airlines greener:
1. Updating air traffic control. “It would be nice to be able to fly from point A to point B as the crow flies, not as it was routed in the 1950s,” he said. The technology to do it is already available; it just needs to put assembled, he added, saying it could be done in a matter of months, not years.
2. Developing commercially viable alternative fuels.
3. Developing and deploying more fuel-efficient airline technologies.

Both airlines execs said they were already working on #3, such as employing “winglets” (I think that’s what they said — I don’t know a lot about planes) that help reduce drag, and replacing old carpets and seat coverings with lighter weight versions.

And the proposed cap-and-trade idea? Don’t get them started. A key quote from Kelly: “The thing that is galling to me about cap-and-trade is that it’s the government that’s keeping us from being more fuel-efficient [by not providing funds to update the antiquated ATC system], then taxing us for it.”

Arpey was in complete agreement: “As an industry, we are mortified that one of the most crucial infrastructures was ignored in the bailout bill, despite all the headlines about delays that are mostly driven by the 50-year-old air traffic control system.” He got applause when, explaining the need to replace the current radar-based system with one based on GPS, “You can put a GPS device on your children and know exactly where they are at all times, but we can’t do the same so we know where our planes are.”

Going back to the cap-and-trade idea, Kelly added that it was even more galling because the money raised through cap-and-trade on the airlines wouldn’t go to updating ATC or anything to do with the airlines, but go to reducing the federal deficit in general. He said the tax and fees burden already amounts to close to 40 percent of the ticket price. And focusing on the airlines’ carbon footprints is a bit out of whack with reality anyway, since planes are only responsible for 2 percent of the greenhouse gases emitted annually, while cars make up an infinitely larger percentage. And even cows that emit methane gas, one of the execs said, perhaps in a hat tip to being in Texas. “Maybe we need a steak tax.”

Anyway, it was a really lively, interesting exchange. Definite educational highlight of the day.

Have to run. I’ll try to at least catch up on yesterday’s doings sometime this morning. I’m bummed that I can’t seem to get wifi anywhere in the convention center, even at the Starbucks hot spot. The lines at the cyber cafe are so long that I feel I shouldn’t do more than make sure the house hasn’t burned down on a quick e-mail check. I’ll try again to get connected today, but if that doesn’t work, I’m going to give up and stop lugging the netbook around.

Andy Borowitz often cracks me up, but this one was just too good not to share: Full Body Scans to Double as Annual Checkups
Solution to Airport Security, Health Care Woes. I particularly liked this part: “The President added that instituting the body scan/checkup could ward off some terrorists right from the start, ‘because a lot of them will balk at the $25 co-pay.’”