News and notes from around the interweb:

• A bipartisan group of Senators is fed up with the mask mandate for planes. After all, they fly quite a lot too.

• John Barron lives! The CEO of Blade made up a fictional person to be his spokesperson. Blade has partnered with Delta and with American. And it’s even more insane and stupid than the snippets here:

  1) When @g_bluestone called Blade to inquire about "Simon McLaren," who was purportedly the company's spokesman for three years but who also is not a real person, Blade chief of staff Lee Gold straight-up lied to her, claiming to have met McLaren.

  — John Cook (@johnjcook) June 17, 2021

  2) This is not a case of using a pseudonym to speak on behalf of the company. Blade and Wiesenthal invented an entire *persona* around McLaren, with a backstory and a personality. AND THEN THEY GAVE HIM A BLOG. They affirmatively pushed a fake person on their customers.

  — John Cook (@johnjcook) June 17, 2021

  3) When they realized that maintaining a metastasizing lie was not tenable for a publicly traded company, they decided to retire McLaren. But instead of just stopping, they created a needless fake drama in which McLaren quit because he needed to blog free of Blade's censorship.

  — John Cook (@johnjcook) June 17, 2021

• United now allows all members to book the last seat available on a plane with miles. Unlike American and Delta they had restricted this to elites and co-brand cardholders. Now that they’ve gone revenue-based, the restriction no longer made any sense. However these awards haven’t offered much value in many years.

  MileagePlus elites and cardholders still have access to some lower-priced awards on United’s flights.

• There’s a shortage of private planes available for purchase

• It’s time to open the US-Canada border

  When infection rates in two areas are similar the argument for closing borders is weak. Canadian and US infection rates are now similar and both countries are highly vaccinated by world standards. The arguments for not opening are mostly psychological, a fear of foreigners. As a result, we have both Canadians fearful of opening to Americans and Americans fearful of opening to Canadians which doesn’t make sense. At least one must be wrong!

• Oops.

  A spokesperson for American Airlines denied there was an odor onboard the aircraft, saying in an emailed statement: “On Tuesday, June 15, American Airlines flight 2878 from Miami (MIA) to Washington, D.C. (DCA) returned to MIA shortly after takeoff due to a possible mechanical issue.”

  “The flight landed safely and without incident at 9:23 a.m. local time. Upon inspection, our maintenance team determined the aircraft slide had deployed after takeoff. Customers later boarded a replacement aircraft for DCA, and we apologize for any disruption this caused to their travel plans. We appreciate our team for taking care of our customers.”

  AA2858 on Tuesday. some kinda in-flight slide thingy? pic.twitter.com/4QXbYSwaeo

  — ˜”*° JonNYC °*”˜ (@xJonNYC) June 17, 2021