News and notes from around the interweb:

• British Airways didn’t buy used Airbus A380s because they’re too expensive to retrofit

  “Imagine that we find a suitable used, relatively new A380 whose owners don’t want any more – think Malaysian, think Emirates, think Lufthansa,” says [British Airways CEO Alex] Cruz. “Imagine they give it to us at a really reasonable price. Everything breaks down the moment you start thinking about the inside of the aircraft.”

  Cruz says the cost to reconfigure the cabin “can run to between $30-50 million” per aircraft. “To put that into a lease rate, all of a sudden it takes the aircraft completely out of the market.”

• Qatar Airways makes the obvious point that — while US airlines lobby the administration to protect them from competition — their 49% investment in Air Italy which predates their statement that they did not at the time intend Qatar to operate new fifth freedom routes between Europe and the US are entirely consistent with each other.

  

• American Airlines bumped a middle school group’s chaperone. The kids were down a chaperone but not left alone on the trip. American listed the denied boarding as voluntary.

• The North African breakfast that ended a war

  Centuries ago, when the North African Amazigh tribes were at war, a truce was brokered with terms stating that each tribe had to cook breakfast for the other to bring peace.

• CFM is running two weeks late delivering engines to Boeing and that’s causing 737 MAX aircraft to crowd the factory airfield, since without engines they cannot be ferried.