News and notes from around the interweb:
- Delta is dropping Los Angeles – London Heathrow (Virgin Atlantic, 49% owned by Delta, will add a second flight) and also dropping Newark – London Heathrow.
- I’m giving away a model EVA Airways Hello Kitty 777 and MicroUSB
- There’s a new campaign to raise taxes on air travel in the UK. Because flying British Airways isn’t expensive enough. Note that this is pitched as being a tax on leisure travelers (as though somehow businesses wouldn’t pay it) and that means those of us on awards, too.
- A lawsuit against Sabre was allowed to proceed alleging they intentionally added Arabic-sounding names to a no fly list. An 18-month old was denied boarding on a JetBlue flight as a result. Although I’m not clear on how Sabre, which asserts there was simply a glitch, would itself be adding names to the no fly list — presumably it has to do with connecting names from the list to passenger records — although perhaps some readers know more details than I do here. (HT: Carrie C)
- A flight from Canada to Mexico stopped in Phoenix and the FBI arrested one of the passengers for securities fraud. Because all that information sharing is just to stop terrorism. (HT: Bryan S.) The individual is suspected of being behind the manipulation of, among others, Cynk Technology — a social networking company with a single employee that ‘valued’ at $6 billion last summer. Here’s a fascinating hypothesis on how the scam may have worked, using government rules to force investors to pay extortionate prices for shares.
- Does the Supreme Court’s ruling in Los Angeles v. Patel have implications for the data airlines are required to collect on us and make available to the government?
- American Airlines receives 175,000 calls to reservations every day. They’ve hired over 1000 phone agents so far this year.
The NY Times article is unclear on whether the flight was ordered to land in Phoenix to arrest the suspect, or if the suspect was just transiting Phoenix as part of his scheduled itinerary (though the language implies the latter). It appears that the Times just quotes the FBI press release, which is equally unclear.
https://www.fbi.gov/newyork/press-releases/2015/secret-owner-of-offshore-brokerage-firm-arrested-for-alleged-leadership-role-in-a-300-million-securities-fraud-and-money-laundering-scheme
At any rate, it appears that the suspect’s movements were regularly monitored as part of a criminal investigation, and it’s not obvious whether mass information sharing was critical to his arrest. Law enforcement agencies have been able to (somewhat effectively) monitor the movements of criminal suspects long before there was massive information sharing on all travelers.
If indeed a nonstop flight was ordered to land in Phoenix just because it carried a criminal suspect and was overflying US airspace, this raises other issues, but I suspect again that the authority to pull down a flight predates all the anti-terrorism legislation.