News and notes from around the interweb:

• How to make thousands of dollars a month renting out cars when you aren’t driving

• Facts about business travel:
  
  1. “[T]here are economies of scale in running businesses that favor large countries”
     
  2. “[B]usiness travel tends to grow more than proportionally with the level of [a country’s] development”
     
  3. “[T]here is almost twice the amount of travel from headquarters to subsidiaries [in different countries] as there is in the opposite direction. Exporters also travel twice as much as importers”

• You’ll want to enter the best giveaway I’ve ever offered for 2 nights at the Al Maha Desert Resort (inclusive of meals and 2 activities daily) thanks to Luxury Travel Diary.

• American Airlines Pilot Union Leader Blasts ‘Culture Gone Awry’ After US Airways Merger.

  Pilot unrest is nothing new for either legacy US Airways or legacy American, actually. And many of the complaints will be solved with the new crew scheduling and integrated pilot seniority lists that should finally come at some point this year we hope.

  Although “obsession with D-zero door-slamming” doesn’t just have an impact on pilots, it leads to problems for passengers, too. Starting boarding at a different time than stated on passenger boarding passes is a problem, whether that boarding begins early or late.

• Thai Airways Thai Smile will “serve meals, provide seats and treat toys as humans” and indeed toys can be treated with humans with supernatural powers. Apparently bringing on life size dolls is ‘a thing’ so passengers have the option to buy a seat for their dolls. They can also just bring the dolls on as their carry on, but the doll then must meet size and weight limits (and can sit in an otherwise-unoccupied seat) or has to be checked.

  Last year a doll wrote a trip report of American Airlines premium transcon service.

• Not sure how I missed this before, a KLM 777 landing in Amsterdam during a violent storm: