Mark Malkoff Spends Month on AirTran to Overcome Fear of Flying

The fear of flying is a perfectly acceptable one (and there's nothing wrong with being afraid of rollercoasters, OKAY?). But life, often, is about overcoming fears. Which is exactly why Mark Malkoff, a 33-year-old comedian and filmmaker, is living on AirTran planes for the next thirty days: he wants out of the dark shadow of fear.

This isn't some publicity stunt either (as far as I can tell): Malkoff seems to legitimately want to get over this fear of flying ... how else can you reasonably explain him taking a shower in an airplane.

In fact, he's avoiding the airport, changing planes via the tarmac (the first hint that AirTran is obviously involved here) and doing push-ups and sprints in the aisles of the airplane for exercise.

Of course, my theory that he's not doing it as a publicity stunt could be shot down by the fact that he's Twittering/Facebooking the whole thing and has a website up about his experience: MarkonAirTran.com.

However, in this day and age, if you do anything remotely resembling a 30-day excursion on a slew of various airplanes, you should probably consider creating a blog about the experience; it's the modern-day, electronic version of a journal, and there's always the chance that some PR firm (say, hypothetically, um, AirTran's???) could pick up on the experience and offer to cop you for the flights -- which, I would presume, is what the airline is doing in this case.

Mark's obviously no stranger to that experience either; he's done previous "projects" like "Mark Lives in IKEA" where he lived in an IKEA store for 30 days and "171 Starbucks" where he visited 171 Manhattan Starbucks in one day. So, yeah, he gets this viral stuff.

Plus, this is the type of story that everyone loves (hence this posting) and in a world where people get famous for doing stupid things on YouTube, there's always a free 15 minutes to be had out there -- it's pretty obvious that Malkoff figured out exactly how to get his.

(Picture via Mark's fantastic Flickr stream. If that's not cool, email me and I'll swap, sir.)

FareFinder: Thursday, February 26

Sandals Resorts offering last-minute getaways, including four nights in the Bahamas for as little as $2,100.

Hurtigruten slashes prices on 17- to 21-day Greenland cruises, including airfare from NYC.

In response to AirTran specials, airlines rush to discount competing fares. Case in point: this Continental flight from Raleigh-Durham to Newark-Liberty.

Five-star Dolder Grand Hotel in Zurich celebrates it re-opening anniversary with buy-one, get-one up to four nights.

Today is Carnival Cruise Line's one-day sale. Specials include a 5-day Caribbean cruise from Galveston for $279.

FareFinder Extra: Summer price wars beginning early

It's no secret that the airline industry is hurting for business. More and more airlines are slashing prices and offering weekly specials and Web fares.

Now, according to the Associated Press, Atlanta-based AirTran Airways is about to jump-start a price war that will give consumers even more of a reason to fly:

In a sign of great uncertainty about demand for air travel this year amid the deep U.S. recession, discount carrier AirTran Airways launched a fare sale to all its destinations Tuesday for flights through the middle of the fall. ... AirTran, a unit of Orlando, Fla.-based AirTran Holdings Inc., said its sale fares, starting as low as $39 one-way, are available for purchase through March 5 for travel through Nov. 4. The biggest discounts are for travel on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.

According to the story, American, Continental, United, US Airways and Delta "quickly matched on routes where they compete with AirTran, and JetBlue said it would do the same."

Coupled with deep discounts from hoteliers, cruise lines and other industry services, there might not be a better time to travel.