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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, via XKCD: http://xkcd.com/radiation/ Three LA to NY flights are more than the approximate dose received at Fukushima Town Hall over two weeks following the accident. But you have to make 175 flights to get as much as you get with just one chest CT scan.
According to that graph a chest x-ray (20 µSv) has half the effect of a LA-NY flight (40 µSv)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, via XKCD: http://xkcd.com/radiation/ Three LA to NY flights are more than the approximate dose received at Fukushima Town Hall over two weeks following the accident. But you have to make 175 flights to get as much as you get with just one chest CT scan.
According to that graph a chest x-ray (20 µSv) has half the effect of a LA-NY flight (40 µSv)
Don't you have to worry about radiation at some point? I mean flying 300 days out of the year has to add up.
I use miles to get flights a couple of times a year. A 'free' long-haul flight economy class costs me $700-800 in taxes, which can not be paid in points. How can these out-of-pocket charges be avoided?
For instance, redeeming AA miles on Japan Airlines will generally cost Japan flight.
It also helps to have a passport that lets you do that.
Seems like he's causing a lot of pollution
I spend more time than I should in the churning/FF communities (all of which are centered around FlyerTalk). It's fun. Ben's blog is one of the few I follow, most aren't that great. Frequent Miler is a solid resource, as is Wandering Aramean, but nothing beats being active on FlyerTalk itself. In the last five years I've managed to earn and spend about 1.5 million miles and points, with maybe 50k airline miles from a…
For the beginners out there:
1. Be sure to read as much about earning miles as redeeming them. Both sides are equally important and redeeming is actually getting much more difficult.
2. Don't let the newbie blogs lure you into hitting credit cards too hard. Banks are starting to tighten the clamps on our hobby. Be sure to learn, start slow, and then start ramping up. Banks like to see a relationship, not just a high credit score.
3. If you're dipping your toe in Manufactured Spending (MS), start small then ramp up over time. Nothing worse than getting shut down for hitting something too hard. That said, MS is a great way to meet minimum spending without using too much money.
4. Don't let headline point valuations fool you into thinking you have to fly in Biz or First to get a good value on your points. Blogs use these kinds of numbers mostly to get you to sign up for CC's. Figure out your your strategy and go that way. A person looking for a lot of domestic flights is going to have a different strategy than someone looking to travel like saryant (and myself, incidentally).
tl;dr; This hobby is amazing if you can figure it out and do the leg work. I too enjoy good champagne 35k ft in the air ;)
If you have any questions, AMA! :)
TL;DR?
Basically the person in the article uses various tricks to game the airline and accumulate as many frequent flyer miles and fly around as much as he can (accumulating even more points it seems). He also writes a blog about it.
Not just frequent flyer miles (which you generally can't get on flights you get by redeeming such miles), but credit vouchers, etc. (that's the whole point of the analysis of which fights are likely to be oversold, so you get tickets on them -- perhaps with frequent flyer miles -- so you get to fly on a later flight after accepting the offered voucher reward for being bumped.)