AirTran sparked the sale this week, with US Airways, United, Delta and American among the airlines following close behind, says Tom Parsons, founder of Bestfares.com who tracks ticket prices and scouted the bargains.

But travelers will have to act fast. Tickets have to be purchased by midnight Thursday for travel through Nov. 16. There are blackout dates around Memorial Day and other holidays. And travelers may have to do some digging to find the lowest fares, particularly in July, or when flying cross-country, Parsons says.

“If you’re flying coast to coast, you’re still going to have to look hard,” he says. “The inventory may be restricted in the summer, so you may have a little bit tougher time. The airlines are not going to give away every single seat at a cheap price. But this is the first big summer sale we’ve had, so there should still be plenty of room.”

Travelers might need to make a connection or travel to a smaller, alternative airport to get the lowest fares. For instance, a round-trip ticket on Delta from Orlando to Chicago Midway in May, with a stopover in Atlanta, was priced at $158, minus fees and taxes, as of Tuesday afternoon.

But there were also some non-stop bargains. A round trip in July from Dallas to New York City on American had a base fare of $174, Parsons says.

Though the sale fares require a 10-day advance purchase, the large travel window is unusual, Parsons says. Coupled with deals that can cut a normally $400 coast-to-coast ticket price in half, he says, they’re worth the search.

“We haven’t had a 200-day sale in a long, long time,” he says, noting that the deals allow travel every day except Fridays and Sundays. “It’s Christmas in March as far as I’m concerned. And you’d better take the gift while you can.”

AirTran says it’s not unusual for it to offer sale fares that can be used over a broad time period.

“We’re trying to really entice people to book travel,” spokesman Christopher White says. “We cast the net pretty wide.”

And as the struggling airline industry competes for every last passenger, he says that he’s not surprised that other carriers quickly followed suit. “The unofficial motto is: Match (the fare) or die.”

Branson AirExpress is scheduled to start flying May 17 to and from Des Moines; Terre Haute, Ind.; Shreveport, La.; Houston; and Austin on a three-month trial.

Branson AirExpress is a start-up public charter service operated by the same people who run Branson Airport. The goal is the same they had in building and operating an airport without taxpayers’ money: to bring more leisure travelers and their vacation dollars to this Ozarks mecca of country music and family entertainment.

In doing so, the airport says, it’s also offering a model for other cities to attract business by offering greater accessibility from the air.

“This is a pretty exciting development,” says Jeff Bourk, executive director of Branson Airport and president of Branson AirExpress. “We are out there to bring people here.”

Aviation consultant Joel Antolini, who has advised Branson Airport the past three years, says creating the airline is a self-help initiative to bring in visitors in tough economic times.

“This is not about the flights making money themselves,” says Antolini, senior vice president at Seabury APG in Reston, Va. “This is about bringing people to communities in a tough time.”

Flying to Branson

Impressed with the roughly 8 million visitors who drove or were bused to Branson in recent years, private investors last year opened the $155 million airport in hopes of reaping dividends from visitors who would rather arrive in jets.

That attracted commercial service from AirTran Airways, which offers two flights daily from Atlanta in peak times and a weekly flight from Orlando. Frontier Airlines will begin offering four flights a week from Denver next month.

But that’s not enough, Bourk says. The airport thought it could attract more vacationers from nearby markets if they had an easier way to get to Branson. Among those identified: Terre Haute, 370 miles away, and Des Moines, 340 miles away. “There are buses from those places that are coming to Branson all the time,” Bourk says.

After running experimental charters to Shreveport and Rockford, Ill., last year, the airport decided to launch Branson AirExpress on a trial basis. It’s contracted with regional carrier ExpressJet of Houston for 50-seat Embraer jets, crews, maintenance and insurance. The airport management is doing the booking, ticketing and ground services.

The airport and the new air service are two distinct businesses with their own books, despite being run by the same people. They’re inseparable, however, when it comes to the goal of getting visitors to fly here. The airport gets $8.24 from the city of Branson for every visitor who flies in.

To try to improve its chance for success, Branson AirExpress is striking partnerships to make the network a two-way street.

The service is getting breaks from other airports on landing and other airport fees, or in marketing assistance. Terre Haute, for instance, will waive landing fees and provide ticketing and baggage service.

Des Moines’ Prairie Meadows Racetrack and Casino plans to advertise through Branson AirExpress in a bid to attract Branson-area residents to Iowa’s capital for a little gambling. Austin hopes to lure them to the Texas capital for its live music entertainment.

A desperate move?

Not everyone thinks Branson’s venture into the airline business is a grand idea or something other cities should emulate. Michael Boyd, a national aviation consultant, views it is a desperate move for air service.

“If communities want to pay to fly to Branson, that’s fine,” he says. “Don’t read this to be a model for the future.”

It’s unrealistic to rely on Branson AirExpress to connect to other cities, he says.

But Joakim Karlsson, professor of aviation policy and management at Daniel Webster College in Nashua, N.H., says the Branson model could offer other communities ideas for sparking or enhancing air service. “It can help expand the knowledge base about airports,” he says.

In Branson, Bourk and his team of consultants are optimistic.

If the trial run is successful, he says, Branson AirExpress plans to add more flights and possibly more destinations by summer. It also hopes to generate revenue from selling show tickets and booking hotel rooms.

Consultant Matthew Chaifetz calls Branson’s venture a “very toned-down version” of Allegiant Air.

Allegiant, which began by providing affordable non-stop flights from smaller communities to tourist meccas Las Vegas and Orlando more than a decade ago, has expanded to providing service to more than 60 cities.

Chaifetz says Branson AirExpress has only 50-seat planes to fill to be successful to start. “If they can fill 35 to 40 seats from some of the cities, three to five times a week, mission accomplished,” he says.

It is along the Liffey riverbanks that many of Dublin’s most iconic sites can be found: the majestic Custom House, the quaintly preserved pedestrian Ha’penny Bridge, the Guinness Brewery. In paintings, postcards and memories, the riverbanks form the perfect microcosm of Dublin and its lifeblood, thriving with traffic, pedestrians and the buzz of the capital.

Many visitors to Dublin use the Liffey as a landmark to point them in the direction of major tourist sites. But that limits their riverbank wandering to the city center, from famed O’Connell Street down to the cobblestoned warren of the Temple Bar tourist quarter and nearby museums.

Those who venture farther, however, following the river to Dublin Port, will find a new, modern Dublin along the shore, replete with dining and entertainment options in a sleek, trendy setting. Mixed in among these neighborhoods on the north and south sides, they can also find elements of the old Dublin tucked away, along with memorials and reminders of the city and country’s rich history.

Following the Liffey on the north side away from the city center, visitors will come upon the International Financial Services Centre with tenants like KPMG and JPMorgan Chase. Adjacent to these financial powerhouses, however, is a beautifully restored building called chq — the latest incarnation of a former tobacco store with vaults underneath.

Bright and airy, with a glass exterior, the building now houses a handful of eateries, high-end shops and the occasional art installation. The area next to the building, known as the Docklands, hosts annual events including a Fringe Festival in late summer, an Oktoberfest celebration in autumn and a Christmas market in December. Each of these events brings droves of people into the Docklands, and most feature food, artisan kiosks and various performances with an electric, festive ambiance.

Just across from this space, however, is a somber sight on the north banks of the Liffey: A famine memorial with life-size sculptures of starving men and women, and even a skeletal dog, making their way toward Dublin Port to leave Ireland’s shores during the Great Famine of the 1840s. Just a few steps away, closer to the port, a replica of the ship Jeanie Johnston is anchored in tribute to the 2 million who emigrated.

A stroll farther along the Liffey leads to another anchored ship, the MV Cill Airne, which is the Irish spelling of Kerry town Killarney. Turned into a bar and restaurant, it’s a beautiful place to have a drink on a sunny summer’s day, surveying the Liffey’s long riverbanks while enjoying a pint of Guinness on the deck. During more (frequent) rainy weather, diners can also enjoy a gourmet meal with river views on the enclosed main deck in Quay 16 restaurant.

The rest of the north side of the Docklands features swanky new apartments and a soon-to-open conference center with a tilted glass-enclosed front. Some taxi drivers already jokingly refer to the building as “The Pint” — a play on the former name of a nearby concert venue once known as The Point. This entertainment hall, located at the edge of the quays before the port, was redeveloped and renamed the O2. It opened in December 2008 and is the largest indoor concert hall in Ireland, with 9,500 seats.

Crossing to the other side of the river — possibly using either the pedestrian Sean O’Casey Bridge or the just-opened Samuel Beckett Bridge, both named for Dublin-born writers — leads to an even trendier part of the city. Grand Canal Dock is a chic collection of bright lights, fashionable apartments and stylish restaurants. U2’s former recording studio, Windmill Lane, is here, covered in graffiti left by hard-core fans on pilgrimages to the band’s home city and haunts. A few blocks away, Facebook just opened its international headquarters in a Grand Canal Dock building, and Google’s European headquarters stands a 10-minute walk away from the river — signaling the area’s arrival as a 21st-century center of commerce and technology.

Most importantly, the neighborhood is home to the Daniel Libeskind-designed Grand Canal Theatre, an asymmetric architectural masterpiece. It is scheduled to open by St. Patrick’s Day this year and will host concerts, musical theater performances and other shows.

Just a block from this cutting-edge theater, however, is an old-school pub that is a throwback to the Dockland’s former identity as, well, docklands. Both sides of the river were known as rough areas until the 1980s — the haunts of hardened sailors and dockhands. The Ferryman pub, formerly a watering hole for the local workingmen, is now more often packed with suited lawyers and other corporate types who stop in for pints after work. It’s painted red on the outside and jam-packed with typical Irish pub decorations (framed photos, dusty bottles on shelves, everything you’d expect to find in an old-time Dublin “local”). But like so many other places in this recently gentrified area, it’s a great mix of old and new.

Located in an endless row of T-shirt shops, candy stores and hotels, it’s offered a tasty start for tourists in the resort town before they head out to play miniature golf, explore a quiet mountain trail or try to spot an elusive black bear.

It’s easy to spot on busy U.S. 441, the town’s main street: Just look for a line of people waiting outside with fidgety anticipation. Inside, patrons attack piles of pancakes with the persistence of a woodpecker.

The restaurant touts itself as the oldest pancake house in Tennessee. It turns 50 on March 17, and will celebrate by using the original menu and charging 1960 prices — mostly under $1.

“After 50 years, we’re serving our fourth generation,” says owner Jim Gerding. “Kids who ate here 45 years ago, now bring their great-grandkids. We are still feeding these same families.”

“I don’t know what they do but the pancakes are better than any place else,” gushed Ron Byars of Gatlinburg, who had eight silver dollar pancakes. “I’ve eaten other places, but these are altogether different.”

The lines at the restaurant are legendary in the resort town that’s the gateway to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where 9.4 million tourists visit yearly. The wait usually is around 20 minutes for one of the valuable 190 seats, but customers have been known to stand outside for an hour.

The experience is pure Americana, embraced by mountain mist, where you feast on wallet-friendly food served with down-home accents.

“It’s a hand-crafted operation,” Gerding says.

Most of the pancakes run $6 to $8. There are 24 varieties on the menu with buttermilks the most popular.

What would you like on ‘em or in ‘em? There’s whipped cream, whipped butter, pineapple syrup, black walnuts, chocolate chips, lingonberry butter, lemon wedges, diced apricots, peach and apple cider compote, mountain blueberries, sweet potatoes, red raspberries, coconut, strawberries, pecans, raisins, cherries, peaches and a lip-smacking array of other toppings.

Secrets?

Fresh ingredients. Batter is prepared daily and refrigerated carefully at special temperatures. Syrups and compotes are prepared diligently. When business tails off in winter, less batter is prepared to ensure its freshness.

“One of our strengths is we pay close attention to details,” Gerding said. “If things aren’t right, we don’t serve it.”

And, for sure, he’s a picky eater. His cooks come up with special recipes regularly but they have to pass his taste test.

“Maybe one in 10 makes the grade,” Gerding said. To that end, some of the recipes are 50 years old.

Waitresses get birthday cards from out-of-town customers, and patrons bring in cakes and pies for the staff.

“The waitresses know many of them on a first name basis,” Gerding said. “We see familiar faces year after year.”

Fifteen of the 40 employees have been with the restaurant at least 20 years. One waitress began serving pancakes in 1963 and five cooks have worked at the restaurant at least 32 years.

Gerding, at age 81, is there three or four days a week.

“I like to interface with the customers and be with the employees,” he said.

His personal touch may be something he learned at Indiana University, where he earned two degrees in business.

Ninety percent of patrons are repeat customers.

“People love to tell us how long they’ve been coming to Gatlinburg and have eaten with us,” Gerding said.

The 18 largest carriers reported that 78.7% of their flights arrived on time in January, better than both January 2009’s 77% and December 2009’s 72%, according to the Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Flights are considered on time if they arrive within 15 minutes of schedule.

The report says nearly 40% of the delays were directly or indirectly attributable to weather, including factors such as cancellations, aviation system delays and late-arriving aircraft.

Hawaiian Airlines, which flies mostly among the Hawaiian islands, once again posted the highest on-time performance with 86.7%. Among larger carriers, Alaska Airlines had the highest, at 85.8%. It was followed by United Airlines, which posted 83.7%.

American Airlines subsidiary American Eagle had the worst performance, with 72.8%.

There were 23 flights with tarmac delays of three hours or more, including two that exceeded four hours. Still, it was better than December, when airlines stranded 35 flights on the tarmac for three or more hours.

Delta Air Lines reported two of the longest tarmac delays in January. Its flight from Fort Myers, Fla., to New York LaGuardia on Jan. 25 sat on the runway for 4 hours and 13 minutes. Another Delta flight — from Charlotte to Atlanta on Jan. 24 — was delayed on the tarmac for 4 hours and 5 minutes. Under a new federal rule that takes effect on April 29, the airline will have to pay $27,500 per passenger for flights that are delayed on the tarmac for more than three hours.

Other findings from the report:

•Cancellations. The airlines canceled 12,800 flights out of 522,000 they operated in January, or down slightly from 14,700 in December.

•Mishandled baggage. U.S. carriers posted a mishandled baggage rate of 4.62 reports per 1,000 passengers in January, better than both January 2009’s 5.31 rate and December 2009’s 5.18 mark.

•Customer complaints. In January, the Transportation Department received 927 complaints about airline service from consumers, up from 885 in January 2009 and 692 in December 2009.

•Flight oversale. The airlines denied boarding to 69,200 passengers in 2009 out of about 582 million enplaned passengers. That compares with 64,000 out of 576 million in 2008.

The Cloud Nine ride, located across from the Mandalay Bay hotel-casino on the south end of the Strip, shut down the ride after the Saturday night incident.

Clark County Director of Development Services Ron Lynn said Monday that an aluminum band that connects the passenger compartment to the tether lines is damaged.

But Lynn says the balloon requires a part from France to be fixed.

A manager with Cloud Nine did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

Though always tethered to the ground, the attraction rises some 500 feet high to give about two dozen riders a view of the Strip.

American argues that its labor costs are higher than for its rivals. CFO Thomas Horton said Tuesday his company wants pilot costs to be “competitive” with other airlines.

“It’s fair to say we are far apart with the pilots’ union,” Horton said at an investor conference in New York.

The pilots’ union at one point proposed pay raises of more than 50% to restore their purchasing power to 1992 levels. The company rejected that proposal, and the two sides are currently in negotiations overseen by a federal mediator.

American is also in mediator-led talks with its flight attendants and ground workers.

Flight attendants are scheduled to vote next month on whether to authorize a strike.

Federal law makes it difficult for airline employees to strike. The flight attendants’ union plans to ask mediators next week to declare the talks to be stalemated, which could lead to the start of a 30-day cooling-off period after which the union could strike.

The Transport Workers Union, which represents American’s mechanics, is expected to ask mediators this week to let it begin a cooling-off period.

The Department of Transportation’s new rule, which goes into effect April 29, orders airlines to let passengers off planes delayed for three hours or face hefty fines. In December there were 22 flights nationwide that were delayed for more than three hours from gate to departure. The new DOT rule could slap an airline with a fine of $27,500 per passenger for that kind of delay. For an average Boeing 737 with a full load of passengers, the fine could be around $3.5 million.

JetBlue and Delta are the biggest operators at JFK, an airport that was among the worst in the nation for delays last year. The JFK runway closed March 1. That is already causing delays and they could get worse.

May is the first full month the new DOT rule will be in effect. It also is the start of the peak travel season. The airlines have already cut their schedules by about 10% to help ease delays until the runway reopens in July. About one-third of JFK’s traffic and half of its departures are now diverted to three smaller runways.

“Although JetBlue has already taken several steps to minimize the impact of this closure on its JFK operations, this exemption is necessary to ensure that JetBlue is not penalized if JFK becomes gridlocked at peak operating times,” the airline said in its request to DOT.

The Federal Aviation Administration expects delays at JFK will average about 50 minutes during peak times and 29 minutes at other times during the four-month shutdown. That is about the same as delays on busy summer days.

The airlines aren’t just worried about New York delays. Airport construction and other disruptions at a major airport often have a ripple effect on many flights because pilots, flight attendants and airplanes that are needed elsewhere during the day are held up.

“One late flight may delay three additional flights if the resources connect differently, and two or more late flights may delay several more flights,” JetBlue said.

Major cities that are most effected by delays at JFK are Los Angeles, San Francisco and Orlando, Florida.

One-third of the nation’s air traffic goes in, out, or over New York airspace every day — accounting for three-quarters of all chronic airline delays, according to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Artifacts will include a cassette tape in which another reggae great, Peter Tosh, jams a blues song with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, museum curator Herbie Miller said Sunday.

The tape was recorded in June 1977 in New York City, said Miller, who was Tosh’s former manager.

It will be placed alongside the album Escape from Babylon by American singer Martha Velez that Marley produced in 1976.

The museum is requesting donations to help preserve Jamaica’s vibrant music history. The island’s music preservation took a major hit two years ago when officials discovered that a massive collection of 1970s music, including original recordings by Marley and Tosh, disappeared from the archives of the former Jamaica Broadcasting Corp.

The collection has not been found.

Miller said a date has not been set for the opening of the Jamaica Music Museum in Kingston. It will be operated by the government through the Institute of Jamaica, which oversees cultural affairs.

Pilots at airlines receive almost no hands-on training in how to recover from aerodynamic stalls and other extreme scenarios, according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). The reason for the glaring shortfall is that current flight simulators, the backbone of airline training programs, cannot accurately reproduce such calamities.

Years of research in the military and NASA has led to new simulators that accurately represent how planes behave in stalls, severe icing and other crash scenarios, according to the NTSB and scientists — but there is no federal requirement to use those simulators.

The machines could help with one of the most vexing and deadly problems facing aviation. A USA TODAY review of NTSB accident reports over the past decade found that 317 of the 433 airline fatalities on U.S. carriers since 2000 — or 73% — could have been prevented with better simulator training. Around the world, planes that went out of control and crashed killed 1,991 people from 1999 through 2008, according to Boeing. That is more than twice that of the second-biggest category, accidentally flying into a mountain or the ground.

In the crash near Buffalo on Feb. 12, 2009, a pilot jerked the plane into a steep climb that stalled the wings. The proper way to recover would have been to lower the plane’s nose, but the pilot kept trying to pull the nose up, according to the NTSB. The plane struck a house, killing all 49 aboard and a man in the home.

Expanded simulator training “is crucial if we want pilots to recognize and respond appropriately to these deadly stall upset events,” NTSB Chairwoman Debbie Hersman said. The safety agency endorsed enhanced simulators for pilot training last month, and it is up to federal regulators to require them.

The Air Line Pilots Association, the nation’s largest pilots union, says better simulators and other training improvements can reduce accidents.

“There’s no excuse not to” use the new technology, said Bryan Burks, who heads the union’s committee to improve training for handling out-of-control aircraft.

Even advocates of the improved simulators say they are not foolproof. For instance, the machines can’t reproduce violent motions that a real plane encounters when it goes out of control.

Federal regulators have ordered improvements in simulators and are in the process of studying ways to enhance pilot training. However, they are not completely sold on the new simulators.

John McGraw, deputy director of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Flight Standards division, said the agency would prefer to focus on training that helps pilots avoid losing control. “It is too early for us to make a determination whether we need to change something,” McGraw said.