I’m with a group of journalists from Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe this week in California. More than half of them encountered airline delays in getting here. One of the group, 5 days after arriving, is still waiting for British Airways to deliver his luggage.

This is getting ridiculous…

Washington Post: Travelers Face Greater Use of Personal Data. The United States and the European Union have agreed to expand a security program that shares personal data about millions of U.S.-bound airline passengers a year, potentially including information about a person’s race, ethnicity, religion and health.

U.S. citizens are becoming accustomed to the government’s insistence that it collect every scrap of data about absolutely everyone, and then mine the data for anything it desires. This is always couched in anti-terrorism language, but the certainty — not potential — for abuse doesn’t seem to matter to the people in charge.

The U.S. Congress is impotent, by choice. Civil liberties and privacy protectors are essentially powerless, not by choice but through a steady chopping away of liberty — and packing of courts to make formerly beyond-the-pale activities routine.

What is somewhat surprising is the EU agreement to this scheme. European data-privacy laws mean nothing to the U.S. government, and apparently not so much to the EU officials, either.

The last half-dozen or so flights I’ve taken inside the U.S. in recent weeks have been entirely full, or very nearly so. I’ve experienced some delays, but not the horrible ones that some people are having.

One thing for sure: No matter how frequent a flier you may be, you’re unlikely to get an upgrade this summer…

The Economist profiles the man whose company owns London’s awful Heathrow airport in “The man who bought trouble.” Quote:

He has layers of management below him and a global business to run, yet Mr Del Pino has detailed knowledge of the airport’s operations. He knows about the clunky security lanes and the chaotic queues: the queue lengths at check-in and security are recorded every 15 minutes and reported each week to Ferrovial’s board. He knows how filthy the toilets are, because he checks personally. “I started as a young civil engineer building bridges—now I clean toilets at Heathrow,” he reflects. It is a dirty business, but Mr Del Pino seems dedicated to cleaning up the mess at Heathrow.

Can anyone do it?

At a conference hotel outside of Madrid, I’m getting a much faster wireless connection than I do on my wired DSL line at home in Silicon Valley. And keep in mind that the test results, shown at the left, are measuring my connection to a server in New York City, not to a server nearby in Spain.

It’s a fairly normal occurrence when I travel to get faster wired connections — the U.S. is pathetically behind the curve when it comes to broadband. But when even wireless is vastly better, you know the U.S. has a long road ahead to be competitive in the global connectivity race.

The New York Times and Wall Street Journal’s airline-travel columnists are echoing each other today in a warning that air travel in the U.S. is beyond screwed up this summer.

From the Times report:

Now, I could (and God help me, might) spend the rest of this summer writing about delays, cancellations and airplanes packed with people stranded without being able to get off because of bad weather, bad scheduling, bad airline management, the inability of the Federal Aviation Administration to handle growing air traffic — or a combination of the above. Each week, there are reports of long delays and stranded flights.

The Journal piece, meanwhile, begins this way:

While air travel was expected to have its share of hassles this summer, it has turned into a nightmare for many fliers. In recent weeks, travelers have been hit with long delays caused by everything from labor shortages and seasonal thunderstorms to computer snafus.

The number of flights canceled in the first 15 days of June was up a whopping 91% compared with the same period last year, and the number of flights that were excessively late — more than 45 minutes — jumped 61%, according to FlightStats.com. Overall, 70.7% of all U.S. flights arrived on time from June 1 through June 15, compared with 79% last year.

“I fly a lot, and I’ve never seen it this bad this systematically. It’s like the Italian train system,” said Nick Abbott, a vice president at networking concern Intelliden Corp. who was stuck in Philadelphia for two days after his flight on US Airways was delayed and then canceled last week.

Not a good situation…

The Chicago Tribune reports on a systems problem that led to hundreds of delays an cancelations in the airline’s route system a few days ago. Amazingly, the airline cites “human error” — not computer error.

The fact is that “computer error” is almost always a code word for human mistakes. Give United credit for honesty this time.

We occasionally hear from people saying they’ve had a “Dopplr moment” — when the serendipity that Matt discussed at Reboot brought them together with someone in a happily unexpected way.

I’m guessing we’ll hear about more and more of those occasions.