News notes from around the interweb:

• Air New Zealand banned a record number of passengers in 2019

• ACLU sues Customs and Border Protection over secretive teams that detain and interrogate travelers not on any watch list

• Passengers who book basic economy tickets are happier with their flight less frequent flyers may be just excited to fly and less jaded plus they feel they got a bargain. Moreover since you get the seating leftovers and those may be seats that would have cost extra.

  

• Former Spirit Airlines CEO Ben Baldanza has an airline-focused podcast

• Thai Airways presents a new recovery plan to its board involving seat selection fees and new aircraft. At least they’re not relying on crowd sourcing cost-cutting ideas any longer, but they’re not really addressing the four key challenges they face either.

  Everyone must understand this, of course, the real question then is whether there’s enough face saving here to allow the government spigots to continue to flow and subsidize loss-making.

  

• The new concourse at Washington National airport which replaces the dreaded gate 35X will have the following retailers

  Elevation Burger, Timber Pizza, Founding Farmers and Mezeh — as well as two national chains: Peet’s Coffee and P.F. Chang’s. A WHSmith book store and a Capitol File-branded travel store are also planned.

• oneworld will open an alliance-branded lounge at Moscow Domodedovo airport