Travel Globe

ATLANTA — Delta Air Lines said Monday that it made a deal with ticket distributor Travelport that will allow travel agents to sell its "Economy Comfort" seats.

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Those are coach seats with extra legroom. Delta has been selling them on its website and its reservations centers for an extra charge of $19 to $99 above the regular fare for the seat.

Under the deal, travel agents who use Travelport's Galileo, Worldspan or Apollo reservations systems will be able to sell "Economy Comfort" seats later this year.

Airlines have been tangling with distributors over about selling add-ons like checked baggage, upgraded seats, and onboard internet access.

Global distribution systems such as Travelport are a significant distributor of airline tickets, especially to travel agents and corporate travel offices. Both sides have said they want to those add-ons in the global distribution systems, although agreeing on terms has been another matter.

Delta said the Travelport deal is its largest yet for add-on services.

Privately held Travelport and Delta are both based in Atlanta.

Joe Raedle / Getty Images

A Miami-Dade Metrorail train pulls into a station in Miami. The service's ridership increased by 4.2 percent in the first quarter of 2012.

Rising gas prices apparently helped drive a 5 percent increase in public transit ridership in the first three months of 2012, the biggest first-quarter increase in 13 years, transit figures show.

The American Public Transportation Association reported Monday that Americans took almost 125 million more rides on public transit in January, February and March than they did in the same period last year — an increase of 4.98 percent, the largest since the first quarter of 1999.

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Ridership fell sharply after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and had remained relatively stagnant until last year, according to the organization's tallies, which go back to 1996. 

But in the first quarter of last year, the number of rides on trains, light and commuter rail, buses and streetcars began rising year over year — beginning about the time U.S. retail gas prices began their steep climb from an average of $3.10 a gallon in January 2011 to $3.96 a gallon three months later.

Read the full report (.pdf)

"More people are choosing to save money by taking public transportation when gas prices are high," said Michael Melaniphy, president and chief executive of the APTA, a Washington policy group that is lobbying Congress for new surface transportation legislation that would increase spending on public transit.

Karen Friend, manager of Cascades East Transit of central Oregon, said her agency's ridership has increased by 23 percent in the past year.

Saying the increase is probably "due to gas prices," Friend told NBC station KTVZ-TV of Bend, Ore., that "it was to be expected — it definitely was."

But gas prices aren't the only reason for the growth, Melaniphy said in a statement analyzing the APTA figures. With local economies rebounding, more people are commuting to new jobs, some of them on public transportation, he said.

"As we look for positive signs that the economy is recovering, it's great to see that we are having record ridership at public transit systems throughout the country," he said.

One of those systems is the Quincy Transit service in Quincy, Ill., which is racing to build more bus infrastructure to meet record demand. Its ridership jumped from about 400,000 in 2010 to about 500,000 last year, the city reported late last month.

There are some cautions about the APTA figures, however. 

For one thing, passengers are counted each time they board a vehicle, meaning each segment of a trip with transfers — from one bus to another, for example, or from a train to a bus at a transit station — is counted as a separate trip.

And not all transit systems are included in the collation, especially rail systems. For those systems, the organization assumes the same percentage growth it finds for the reporting agencies.

Still, for many people, public options remain vital, said Catherine Hayden of Quincy, Ill.

"If you don't have a car and you have to go someplace and you have to be there — even people that work — they're very dependent on it," Hayden told NBC station WGEM-TV. "I take the bus to the doctor. I take the bus shopping — anything that I need to do."

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The Transportation Security Administration fired five employees and suspended 38 others on Friday for violating security procedures at Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers, Fla.

The security workers violated protocol by willfully not performing random checks, TSA found in an investigation. The violations occurred over a two-month period in 2011, TSA spokesman David Castelveter told msnbc.com.

Southwest Florida International served about 7.5 million passengers in 2011.

NBC News has learned the violations occurred during the late security shift. A TSA employee who joined the late shift in 2011 was concerned that proper procedures weren’t being followed.

Castelveter, in order to protect the identities of those involved, would not confirm or deny the shift covered by the disciplined workers.

TSA said it holds its work force to high standards and “has a zero tolerance for misconduct in the workplace.” The agency insists passenger safety was never jeopardized.

John Mica, R-Fla., chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and an outspoken critic of TSA, said the security violations might involve high-level personnel at the airport.

“Whether TSA is trying to protect administrative bureaucrats from congressional and public scrutiny, or just trying to sweep this breach under the rug, TSA must come clean and provide a full accounting of this incident,” Mica said in a press release.

Last year, dozens of TSA screeners were fired at Honolulu International Airport for not screening checked bags for explosives.

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NBC News' Tom Costello contributed to this report.

A plane with about 150 passengers landed on a two-story building in a suburb of Lagos, Nigeria. NBC's Rohit Kachroo reports.

LAGOS, Nigeria -- A commercial airliner crashed into a densely populated neighborhood in Nigeria's largest city on Sunday, killing all 153 people on board and others on the ground in the worst air disaster in nearly two decades for the troubled nation.

The cause of the Dana Air crash remained unknown Sunday night, as firefighters and police struggled to put out the flames around the wreckage of the Boeing MD83 aircraft. Authorities could not control the crowd of thousands gathered around to see the crash site, with some crawling over the plane's broken wings and standing on a still-smoldering landing gear.

Harold Demuren, the director-general of Nigeria's Civil Aviation Authority, said all on board the flight were killed in the crash. Lagos state government said in a statement that 153 people were on the flight traveling from Nigeria's central capital of Abuja to Lagos in the nation's southwest.

The flight's pilots radioed to the Lagos control tower just before the crash, saying the plane had engine trouble, a military official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak to journalists.

Rescue officials feared many others were killed or injured on the ground, but no casualty figures were immediately available. Firefighters and local residents were seen carrying the corpse of a man from one building, its walls still crumbling and flames shooting from its roof more than an hour after the crash. 

President Goodluck Jonathan later declared three days of national mourning in Africa's most populous nation.

The aircraft appeared to have landed on its belly into the dense neighborhood that sits along the typical approach path taken by aircraft heading into Lagos' Murtala Muhammed International Airport. The plane tore through roofs, sheared a mango tree and rammed into a woodworking studio, a printing press and at least two large apartment buildings in the neighborhood before stopping.

'Huge explosion'
Most people in Lagos' Agege suburb -- where the crash occurred --  live in tin-roofed buildings along unpaved streets.

"We heard a huge explosion, and at first we thought it was a gas canister," said Timothy Akinyela, 50, a local newspaper reporter who was watching a soccer match on TV with friends in a nearby bar.

A white, noxious cloud rose from the crash site that burned onlookers' eyes, as pieces of the plane lay scattered around the muddy ground.

While local residents helped carry fire hoses to the crash site, the major challenges of life in oil-rich Nigeria quickly became apparent as there wasn't any water to put out the flames more than three hours later. Some young men carried plastic buckets of water to the fire, trying to douse small portions. Fire trucks, from the very few that are stationed in Lagos state with a population of 17.5 million, couldn't carry enough water. Officials commandeered water trucks from nearby construction sites, but they became stuck on the narrow, crowded roads, unable to reach the crash site.

The dead included at least four Chinese citizens, the official Chinese news agency Xinhua reported late Sunday, citing Chinese diplomats in Nigeria. Officials at the Chinese embassy in Nigeria could not be reached for comment by the AP.

The spokesman for the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation, Levi Ajuonuma, was also among the dead, according to a passenger list released by the airline. Ajuonuma was also de facto spokesman for the oil minister in OPEC member Nigeria, Africa's biggest crude producer.

Endemic corruption
Nigeria, home to more than 160 million people, suffers from endemic government corruption and mismanagement. The nation also has a history of major aviation disasters, though in recent years there hasn't been a crash. In August 2010, the U.S. announced it had given Nigeria the Federal Aviation Administration's Category 1 status, its top safety rating that allows the West African nation's domestic carriers to fly directly to the U.S.

But many travelers remain leery of some airlines. On Saturday night, a Nigerian Boeing 727 cargo airliner crashed in Accra, the capital of Ghana, slamming into a bus and killing 10 people. The plane belonged to Lagos-based Allied Air Cargo.

Officials with Lagos-based Dana Air did not respond to calls for comment Sunday night. The airline has five aircraft in its fleet and runs both regional and domestic flights. Local media reported a similar Dana flight in May made an emergency landing at the Lagos airport after having a hydraulic problem.

Nigeria has tried to redeem its aviation image in recent years, saying it now has full radar coverage of the entire country. However, in a nation where the state-run electricity company is in tatters, the power grid and diesel generators sometimes both fail at airports, making radar screens go blank.

Sunday's crash appeared to be the worst since September 1992, when a military transport plane crashed into a swamp shortly after takeoff from Lagos. All 163 army soldiers, relatives and crew members on board were killed.

'Oh God, we lost him'
The crash also comes as Nigeria, which became a democracy in 1999 after years of military rule, faces increasing sectarian bloodshed across its largely Muslim north from a radical Islamist sect known as Boko Haram. Earlier Sunday, a suicide car bomber killed at least 15 people and wounded dozens of others.

As night began to fall Sunday, more and more worried relatives of passengers arrived in the neighborhood, pushing their way down the crowded, narrow streets to make it to the crash site. One man stopped to ask about the crash, whether any passengers walked away alive.

His eyes grew wide when he heard no one escaped alive, his hand rising to his mouth. His brother was onboard.

"Oh God, we lost him," the man whispered, before slowly walking away.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

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A plane with about 150 passengers landed on a two-story building in a suburb of Lagos, Nigeria. NBC's Rohit Kachroo reports.

LAGOS, Nigeria -- A commercial airliner crashed into a densely populated neighborhood in Nigeria's largest city on Sunday, killing all 153 people on board and others on the ground in the worst air disaster in nearly two decades for the troubled nation.

The cause of the Dana Air crash remained unknown Sunday night, as firefighters and police struggled to put out the flames around the wreckage of the Boeing MD83 aircraft. Authorities could not control the crowd of thousands gathered around to see the crash site, with some crawling over the plane's broken wings and standing on a still-smoldering landing gear.

Harold Demuren, the director-general of Nigeria's Civil Aviation Authority, said all on board the flight were killed in the crash. Lagos state government said in a statement that 153 people were on the flight traveling from Nigeria's central capital of Abuja to Lagos in the nation's southwest.

The flight's pilots radioed to the Lagos control tower just before the crash, saying the plane had engine trouble, a military official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak to journalists.

Rescue officials feared many others were killed or injured on the ground, but no casualty figures were immediately available. Firefighters and local residents were seen carrying the corpse of a man from one building, its walls still crumbling and flames shooting from its roof more than an hour after the crash. 

President Goodluck Jonathan later declared three days of national mourning in Africa's most populous nation.

The aircraft appeared to have landed on its belly into the dense neighborhood that sits along the typical approach path taken by aircraft heading into Lagos' Murtala Muhammed International Airport. The plane tore through roofs, sheared a mango tree and rammed into a woodworking studio, a printing press and at least two large apartment buildings in the neighborhood before stopping.

'Huge explosion'
Most people in Lagos' Agege suburb -- where the crash occurred --  live in tin-roofed buildings along unpaved streets.

"We heard a huge explosion, and at first we thought it was a gas canister," said Timothy Akinyela, 50, a local newspaper reporter who was watching a soccer match on TV with friends in a nearby bar.

A white, noxious cloud rose from the crash site that burned onlookers' eyes, as pieces of the plane lay scattered around the muddy ground.

While local residents helped carry fire hoses to the crash site, the major challenges of life in oil-rich Nigeria quickly became apparent as there wasn't any water to put out the flames more than three hours later. Some young men carried plastic buckets of water to the fire, trying to douse small portions. Fire trucks, from the very few that are stationed in Lagos state with a population of 17.5 million, couldn't carry enough water. Officials commandeered water trucks from nearby construction sites, but they became stuck on the narrow, crowded roads, unable to reach the crash site.

The dead included at least four Chinese citizens, the official Chinese news agency Xinhua reported late Sunday, citing Chinese diplomats in Nigeria. Officials at the Chinese embassy in Nigeria could not be reached for comment by the AP.

The spokesman for the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation, Levi Ajuonuma, was also among the dead, according to a passenger list released by the airline. Ajuonuma was also de facto spokesman for the oil minister in OPEC member Nigeria, Africa's biggest crude producer.

Endemic corruption
Nigeria, home to more than 160 million people, suffers from endemic government corruption and mismanagement. The nation also has a history of major aviation disasters, though in recent years there hasn't been a crash. In August 2010, the U.S. announced it had given Nigeria the Federal Aviation Administration's Category 1 status, its top safety rating that allows the West African nation's domestic carriers to fly directly to the U.S.

But many travelers remain leery of some airlines. On Saturday night, a Nigerian Boeing 727 cargo airliner crashed in Accra, the capital of Ghana, slamming into a bus and killing 10 people. The plane belonged to Lagos-based Allied Air Cargo.

Officials with Lagos-based Dana Air did not respond to calls for comment Sunday night. The airline has five aircraft in its fleet and runs both regional and domestic flights. Local media reported a similar Dana flight in May made an emergency landing at the Lagos airport after having a hydraulic problem.

Nigeria has tried to redeem its aviation image in recent years, saying it now has full radar coverage of the entire country. However, in a nation where the state-run electricity company is in tatters, the power grid and diesel generators sometimes both fail at airports, making radar screens go blank.

Sunday's crash appeared to be the worst since September 1992, when a military transport plane crashed into a swamp shortly after takeoff from Lagos. All 163 army soldiers, relatives and crew members on board were killed.

'Oh God, we lost him'
The crash also comes as Nigeria, which became a democracy in 1999 after years of military rule, faces increasing sectarian bloodshed across its largely Muslim north from a radical Islamist sect known as Boko Haram. Earlier Sunday, a suicide car bomber killed at least 15 people and wounded dozens of others.

As night began to fall Sunday, more and more worried relatives of passengers arrived in the neighborhood, pushing their way down the crowded, narrow streets to make it to the crash site. One man stopped to ask about the crash, whether any passengers walked away alive.

His eyes grew wide when he heard no one escaped alive, his hand rising to his mouth. His brother was onboard.

"Oh God, we lost him," the man whispered, before slowly walking away.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

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• Tahrir Square occupied as anger grows over Mubarak verdict
• Google tells Chinese when they're being censored
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