News and notes from around the interweb:

• United Airlines is not your door mat. It’s also not your washer dryer, or your spatula. (Piece is about United route expansion, ‘turning on offense’, but I especially loved the title of the article.)

  

• Airbus is proposing to shareholders to change its name… from Airbus Group SE to Airbus SE.

• It appears that the points from the huge cheap British Airways Avios deal are posting based on base subscription price without add-ons even though add-on services aren’t excluded from mileage-earning under the offer’s terms. Once miles are in your account it will be time to follow up for the missing points. And enough people will do this that it’ll become a thing (or of course you’ll have legitimate grounds for your money back, and may even wind up keeping the miles that do post).

  Of course if you aren’t happy with the miles you’re getting, and don’t want to fight, cancel your order right away.

• 500 free La Quinta Returns points for connecting to their social media, this offer was around in the fall, now it’s back.

• Hot on the heels of Cathay Pacific’s new beer specially-brewed to taste great at altitude (no word if it’s also ‘less filling’ at altitude), Virgin Australia has selected a Shiraz they claim is uniquely appropriate for inflight consumption.

• The government’s own inspector general found TSA classifies information purely to cover its own butt.

  Inspector General John Roth’s cover memo…sharply criticized TSA for requiring that bits and pieces of the information in various tables be blacked out—or in security-speak, redacted. Roth laid it on the line: “The redactions are unjustifiable and redact information that had been publicly disclosed in previous Office of Inspector General reports”. He followed this with six examples of airport-specific deficiencies that had been reported in previous audits of individual airports but were all of a sudden supposed to be treated as Sensitive Security Information (SSI).

  After citing these examples, Roth wrote that “I can only conclude that TSA is abusing its stewardship of the SSI program. None of these redactions will make us safer and simply highlight the inconsistent and arbitrary nature of decisions that TSA makes regarding SSI information. This episode is more evidence that TSA cannot be trusted to administer the program in a reasonable manner.”

• Brussels Airlines’ new Extra (s)mile campaign lets you nominate someone for a surprise once in a lifetime experience and the video is kinda cute and cheesy.