A Texas woman is paralyzed after getting up to use the lavatory, ignoring the fasten seat belt sign, as her Continental Airlines flight approached McAllen Airport in turbulent weather. Naturally, her family is suing Continental. Yes, when you gotta go, you gotta go, but is Continental really to blame? From ABCNews.com. (True, this has nothing to do with airfares, except it does... if people win law suits like this, airfares go up. You and I end up paying. In any case, this woman's family is paying a lot more than the airfare for this flight.)

Alaska Airlines is offering 30% off fares to and from Minneapolis. This promo code discount expires today at midnight Pacific Time.

Southwest Airlines has put Nashville on sale with a promo code discount 1/2 price sale.

See fares from Nashville.

See fares to Nashville.

This promo deal is only valid for today, but beware that even with the promo, other airlines might have a better fare, so shop around. Also, in some cases we found the promo discount was only applicable to higher fares on various routes. Even so, in some cases, you'll save a lot of money with this deal. We also found that you don't really save a full 30% from what you'd find, say, on Travelocity. We found, for example, Wenatchee WA to Oakland for $243 RT with tax on Travelocity and the exact same flights and dates on Alaskaairlines.com, with the supposed discount, at $222.80 RT. So either Travelocity has lower base fares than Alaska does on its own site, which would be a first, or something's wrong with Alaska's calcuator.

Here's what we found on Alaskaairlines.com:

And here are the same flights on Travelocity (the base fare before taxes on Alaska is higher than the with-taxes fare on Travelocity). Alaska? Travelocity? Care to enlighten us? We did email Alaska's PR department, but they didn't get back to us.

Same route, same dates, but two different ways to buy.

Using a 50% off promo code on Southwest.com, you'd pay $258 RT including taxes.

But Kayak says you'd have pay $400 with taxes. But only if you like paying more than you really need to.

Southwest is at it again with promo code deals, this time to/from Philadelphia (the "LUV" airline and the city of brotherly love). We're calculating the discounts for each Southwest fare as we speak (it's pretty easy if you can just divide a number in half, which is about as far as our math skills take us). Needless to say, you can only book these low fares on Southwest's site, and they will not be picked up by any fare alert, fare forecasting, fare comparison, or fare search site, because they're not processed by our friends at ATPCO.

SEE FARES FROM PHL here.

SEE FARES TO PHL here.

Travel is valid May 1 to June 10 and the sale ends today!

Starting July 9, you'll pay $20 for the first checked bag on US Air and $30 for the second, unless you pay the fee online. Dividend Miles Preferred members are exempt from fees. And people without computers (my sister, for example) are out of luck.

Sale ends midnight today. Great fares! You'll only see these fares on JetBlue.com because JetBlue wants to sell you to direct.

Another tale of two airfares: you'll save nearly $100 by buying "direct" on this route rather than from an ATPCO-sourced airfare site such as Orbitz.

Same flights/dates on Orbitz: $655 RT.

Just $576 RT on Icelandair.com:

New York to Dublin in May for $297 RT including taxes and more deals.