parking lots
There is one sector of the airline industry that's seeing big increases in business these days: Commercial aircraft storage facilities, mainly located in the deserts of the western U.S., where airlines park their surplus planes until times improve. According to GlobalPlaneSearch.com, a site that helps aircraft sellers and buyers find each other, as of mid-February there were 2,571 commercial aircraft parked in the desert (420 widebodies, 1,228 single-aisle jets, 751 turboprops and 172 regional jets). And that was before the Iraq war and the SARS scare put even more planes out of service.

turn here
The next generation of driving directions could come through a mobile phone. At DFW and Washington Dulles, Avis and Motorola are testing a new phone-based navigation service called Avis Assist. It uses a GPS-enabled Motorola wireless handset and speakerphone to give drivers spoken turn-by-turn directions to their destinations. Meanwhile, Rand McNally recently launched Mobile Travel Tools, a new application for 3G mobile phone users that provides driving directions anywhere coast to coast. It has a menu-driven interface, and local caching so you can save the directions when you're out of network range.

rental report