News and notes from around the interweb:

• Say what? San Bernardino airport has signed an MOU of cooperation with Abu Dhabi Airports. I’m guessing this partnership won’t drive much aviation traffic.

• It’s not just London Gatwick where British Airways is ‘densifying’ its Boeing 777 aircraft. The press release suggested Heathrow 777s would keep more comfortable flying, but it turns out that was a typo which has since been corrected.

  
  Credit: British Airways

• Class action lawsuit by Newark baggage handlers and maintenance certified against American Airlines alleging that the airline programmed time clocks to round down. (HT: @bags)

• Up to 30,000 American AAdvantage miles for funding a new investment account

• JetBlue files with DOT in support of Air China 5th freedom flights from the U.S. purely to Fisk and troll United. It’s awesome.

• Rolls Royce spending hundreds of millions of dollars to repair 787 engines

• Qatar Airways projects a large financial loss, driven by the UAE and Saudi Arabia’s blockage of the country. They could even require a capital contribution because, their CEO points out, Qatar’s laws don’t allow them to benefit from Chapter 11 the way United, Delta, and American did.

  

• The head of the TSA says airport security has to move beyond checkpoints. And certainly there are dangers pre-security as the attacks at the Brussels and Istanbul airports demonstrate. Of course those targets are the result of the checkpoints themselves, as I wrote in a long form piece in 2002,

  Take the long security screening lines that have become the bane of air travelers everywhere. An ambitious terrorist could easily detonate a bomb in the crowd, killing hundreds and scaring Americans away from air travel—possibly for good. Moving the lines further out of the airport simply recreates the problem elsewhere. And as security measures become more stringent, our freedom to travel is encumbered, though we aren’t any safer than before.