Shopping for tickets to Cologne for a trip this winter and found this interesting itinerary on cheaptickets.com:

For those of you not familiar with Germany’s geography, Cologne is less than 40km (about a 30 minute train ride) from Dusseldorf, so the notion of connecting through Heathrow to get there, while adding 6 hours to your trip, is ludicrous. This would be about like flying through Detroit to get from Midway to O’Hare.

Another attempt and things got a little better:

Now we can fly from Dusseldorf to Frankfurt (55 minutes) and take the 74 minute train ride from Frankfurt to Cologne.

This is all amusing enough, but it does make me wonder, though, if any poor souls have been unfortunate enough to unsuspectingly purchase tickets for, and fly on, similar nonsense routings.

Pardon my digression from the stated purpose of this site, but I have encountered the (non-)word "aircrafts" so frequently, both spoken and written, over the past several weeks that I can no longer remain silent on the issue.

Technically speaking, “aircrafts” isn’t even a word. So, for the love of Bernoulli and Newton, please stop using it!

I know. It is such a trivial thing that it really shouldn’t bother me, but this foible should never have surfaced to begin with. What I mean by that is that there is no excuse for the places “aircrafts” has been raising its ugly head. I was at a presentation recently were the speaker kept saying “aircrafts”, and I felt like Indigo Montoya. But the person was covering a line of business outside of her own, so I didn’t make much of it. However, a week later, I read some material originating from someone who is no stranger to the industry and there it was again. Repeatedly. Agghhh!! Remember, just because Microsoft Office doesn’t put a red squiggly underneath it, doesn’t make it right. There were actually a few other incidents, too, if you can believe it. I admit it. It was just too much for me to handle.

It is my hope that this post will provide a public service, and my readers will never be tempted to duplicitously pluralize aircraft by conjoining that insidious extraneous letter S.