There’s nothing quite as romantic as gliding over the earth’s gorgeous landscapes and waterways. The dream of flying is a reality for the modern human being; and to think that it wasn’t so long ago that a trip to the next village was a big adventure. Riding a bike to the next village is still an adventure, but journeying through the air, now that’s special. It is the same excitement that a long journey, skiing or an adventure brings which attracted Amelia Mary Earhart to soaring the airwaves. It’s just gone the 24th July, 2012. This date would celebrate her birthday 115 years ago. From America, Amelia was the first aviatrix, let alone woman, to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. In completion of her flight across the Atlantic Ocean, she was awarded the U.S Distinguished Flying Cross.

As Amelia Earhart grew up, she had a delightful childhood filled with adventure and fun. She would spend hours hunting rats with a rifle, climbing trees, and flying down snowy slopes on her sled. In her writings, Amelia Earhart shared about her first flight being in a wooden box. Ending rather abruptly, she emerged from the broken wooden box with a bruised lip, torn dress and a “sensation of exhilaration.” She exclaimed, “It’s just like flying!”

A number of years on, she and a young woman friend visited an air fair in Canada. One of the great highlights for them both was a flying exhibition put on by a World War I pilot overhead. He flew straight at them as they were watching the display in an isolated clearing. She said, “… I believe that little red airplane said something to me as it swished by.”

It was at Long Beach in the USA, on December 28, 1920, that Earhart and her father visited an airfield where Frank Hawks gave her a ride in a plane that was an experience that would forever change Amelia Earhart’s life. She wrote, “By the time I had got two or three hundred feet off the ground, I knew I had to fly.”

Her love of flying gained her many records and awards along the way. Other solo flights she completed included her being the first person to fly solo from Honolulu, Hawaii to Oakland, California. Later that same year, 1935, she flew solo from Los Angeles to Mexico City. The next record attempt was a nonstop flight from Mexico City to New York. Amelia also enjoyed air racing, where she always seemed to do commendably well.

Amelia Earhart provides many people with much inspiration, as she was a lady who wrestled with prejudice, discrimination and adventure to become one of the first women to fly. Sadly, her final flight was to be on July 2, 1937 (aged 39), where she disappeared over the Pacific Ocean, en route to Howland Island. Controversy resides over her disappearance; however, most people believe she landed in the ocean and was lost at sea.  But you never know…

Today, female pilots are still in the minority but are still out there and up there, taking the controls of trans-Atlantic flights.  So don’t be surprised if you hear a woman’s voice coming over the intercom during your next flight saying “This is your captain speaking…”.

Jet setting around the world is always a fabulous way to spend a vacation, but if you’ve never flown internationally you might find that the process is a little overwhelming at times.  As with any vacation, the way to reduce stress is to be prepared and have all of your travel documents ready to go before you leave the house.  Here are the best ways to prepare for international travel:

Two to three months before your departure date, you need to start submitting the paperwork to get your passport and visas, if required.  Since you often make international travel arrangements six months to a year in advance, that would be a good time to start submitting any of your travel documents — that way, if there are any issues you are not waiting until the last minute to get it taken care of.  Check with the country that you’re traveling to in order to make sure you have all of the necessary passports and visas — every member of the family, no matter what age, needs to have a passport.  If you have a passport, now is the time to make sure it is still valid and it good six months past your vacation date.

If you’re traveling from the United States, you need to visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Travelers Health website to know if you need vaccinations or not.  For example, those traveling to Australia are recommended to get the routine vaccinations if you’re not up to date with your records.  This includes the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine and the DPT (diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus) vaccine.

Now that you’ve taking care of the more serious issues on the itinerary, it’s time to start getting to know your destination.  Pick up maps or travel brochures about the area in which you’re staying to get an idea of tour options, road trips and attractions you would like to see while you are there.  If you need to book transportation such as the car hire, you’ll want to get that done in advance — and always set up tour reservations ahead of time because you don’t want to get there and find out that the tour you are interested in is completely booked!

Traveling internationally is exciting and fun, but there’s a lot of planning that goes into it.  Start planning early so that you aren’t stressed out closer to your vacation day!

The big red kangaroo’s little joey is going places. Yes, Qantas’s subsidiary, Jetstar, has just got a new network. We already know that people around Australia and New Zealand can enjoy cheap, cheap flights (which you can book through us, incidentally) thanks to good old no-frills Jetstar. Now travellers in Japan can enjoy the same combination of budget and quality.

Jetstar Japan has been planned for quite some time. It’s the brainchild of Qantas, obviously, with a bit of help from Japan Airlines and the Mitsubishi Corporation, among other companies. Things ran so smoothly in getting Jetstar Japan off the ground that the first flight headed out of Tokyo five months ahead of schedule. And that’s just the first flight. By the time you read this, more planes will have taken off from the tarmac, heading to various destinations in and around Japan.

Networking is big business for airlines all around the world, and a good network means more efficiency and can also mean lower costs for customers, as the separate airlines within a network can share facilities at different airports at the different origins and destinations. So far, Jetstar has a few little “joeys” (i.e. offspring of the Qantas kangaroo) around the Asia-Pacific region, meaning that you can find this budget airline operating in and out of Australia (obviously), Singapore, Vietnam and New Zealand… and now Japan. And there’s more planned in the pipeline: Jetstar Hong Kong is also being planned and it’s scheduled to get underway next year as soon as it’s ticked all the boxes in the paperwork and jumped through all the bureaucratic hoops.

Jetstar Japan is getting ambitious. The demand for low-cost carriers is as big in Japan as it is elsewhere in the world. However, Jetstar Japan hopes to become the top low-cost carrier in Japan. And this goal shouldn’t be that hard for them to achieve. Already, Jetstar in general is the top low-fare carrier in the Asia-Pacific region. The competition may get hotter if some of the Chinese airlines decide to do what Qantas has, but this can only be good news for travellers, as we all know the main way that airlines are likely to compete to attract us: dropping the price of a seat! Let’s see what happens…

One thing that is a bit different about Jetstar Japan and the Jetstar Group relates to the CEOs. In most airlines, the CEO goes to the loo behind a door marked “Gents”. Not so with the Jetstar Group and Jetstar Japan. Refreshingly, both CEOs are women, with Jayne Hrdlicka heading up the Jetstar Group and Miyuki Suzuki heading up Jetstar Japan. As a female writer, I’m probably sticking my neck out a bit to suggest that this is one reason why the first flight headed out from Tokyo!

Jetstar Japan flies Airbus A320 aircraft and is all set to make low-cost flights among Tokyo, Osaka, Sapporo, Fukuoka and Okinawa, plus a few destinations outside of Japan, where travellers can make connections with other Jetstar flights… or head even further afield.

All the best, Jetstar Japan. We’re looking forward to listing your deals here on our site.