The first authorised mobile phone call from a commercial flight was made on 20 March at 30,000 feet en route to Casablanca, during Emirates flight EK751 from Dubai, reports Nick de Cent.

The Emirates Airbus A340-300 aircraft is the first in the airline’s fleet to be equipped with a new hi-tech system from British-based AeroMobile. The company is a joint venture between Norwegian telecoms group Telenor and ARINC, and is the result of a research project at Telenor.

Business flyers travelling via London are turning to private charters to bypass so-called ‘Heathrow hassle’, according to Chapman Freeborn airchartering.

London’s business community and a number of politicians including mayor Ken Livingstone have voiced their concerns – that the way airports manage ramped-up security procedures put in place to counter potential security threats continue to cause travellers major inconvenience and delays on even the shortest domestic flights. This in turn poses a significant threat to London’s status as a world financial centre, such is the difficulty for executives and traders visiting the capital who perceive that other European cities manage such procedures more efficiently.

Security checks longer than short-haul flights

With stricter checks ordered by the Home Office, coupled with new security technology, just clearing passport control can now take more than an hour, longer than the flight time for some short-haul flights to European business capitals such as Paris, Brussels or Amsterdam. With London’s premier airport crippled with problems, and other London and regional airports similarly afflicted, UK based private jet charter companies are seeing a significant rise in business.

Today’s business travellers are suffering mounting stress and pressure, a new survey reveals.

Sound familiar? Research has found that, on the one hand, today’s business traveller is finally acknowledging the need to achieve an effective work/life balance to ensure consistently good performance at work; on the other hand, many respondents felt pressure to remain constantly available.

Tina Lofthouse scales the heights of cocktail fashion to find the world’s top ten rooms with a view.

When it comes to bars, fashion is particularly fickle. A ‘cool, intimate space’ one week can become a ‘dingy badly-lit basement’ the next. And when you’re entertaining important clients, there is nothing worse than finding your venue of choice is a soulless, or worse, insalubrious dud.

The bars that stand the test of time and never fail to impress are those that look out over fantastic cityscapes.

Here’s our Top 10…