digg_url = 'http://digg.com/travel_places/American_Airlines_Own_Pilots_Protest';
I don't know about you, but when airline pilots organize themselves enough to protest their employer's overall poor performance—not, I'd like to point out, merely their crappy pay—that gets my attention. That's precisely what hundreds of American Airlines pilots intend to do tomorrow in nine cities around the country. They'll be demonstrating at major airports to "encourage passengers to help AA employees get management's attention" to fix problems relating to performance and customer service. Specifically, American has the worst on-time performance among network carriers. The pilots are also, naturally, not particularly amused about the nose-gear-wiring fiasco that grounded hundreds of aircraft and caused countless traveler delays last week.

Next year should still be the real test, with American Airlines and Virgin America inaugurating service, plus a new entrant called Row 44, but JetBlue is trying to hustle ahead of them all. We've posted about this before, but this latest move is yet another sign that it might actually be happening. The company will be offering limited Internet access on a flight from New York to San Francisco next week. How limited? Well, fliers will be able to check email if they've got one of two Blackberry models, or they can use a laptop to access their Yahoo! mail. General web-surfing, though, will be barred. Still, we're hoping it works. Even an hour off-line is just too much to bear.-Gregory Mone

We've been promised inflight Wi-Fi before—last year there was news that Jet Blue was thinking about offering it to customers—but so far it's still not available on U.S. flights. Now American Airlines has announced that it has partnered with AirCell, a Colorado-based communications provider, to launch a cabin-wide Wi-Fi system early next year.

Cross-continental flights will no longer be dead time for communications, as fliers will be able to access the Web, and email, through any Wi-Fi-ready machine.

The price hasn't been determined, but AirCell execs have suggested that it could be as little as $10 per user for a transcontintental flight. That's pennies for time-crunched business travelers hoping to get work done. But the system could also offer a great escape route for someone sitting in a cramped cabin. Imagine spending a few hours playing World of Warcraft or hanging out in Second Life instead of jostling for elbow room.—Gregory Mone

The Texas cattle-country town of Granbury (pop.: 5,718) is an ideal spot for weekend getaways. Located about 65 miles southwest of Dallas, it boasts a stone opera house built in 1886, a double-decker riverboat, a well-worn Jesse James legendeverything except regular airline service. But if an air-taxi demonstration in Danville, Virginia, this month goes as planned, tourists could soon be zipping in and out of Granbury as though it were Dallas.