News and notes from around the interweb:

• Something I didn’t know existed.. Scott Mayerowitz says JetBlue offers ‘coat check’ at New York JFK.

  Yes, leave your jackets in chilly New York while you jet off to Florida or the Caribbean. The only catch: you need to fly back into JFK, it has to be a domestic flight and it costs $2 a day. Still, this service keeps the overhead bins less crowded and prevents passengers from forgetting jackets in their tropical hotel room closets.

• How Alaska Airlines airlifted 48,000 Jews out of Yemen to Israel. It was Operation Magic Carpet.

• Cranky Flier crunches some numbers to give support to the theory that United is facing a mechanics slowdown as the explanation for the airline’s abysmal performance over the past month.

• Pakistan International Airlines is retiring its last 747. One by the the end of an era comes nearer.

• Lightning actually struck a deplaning passenger I’ve never heard of this happening before.

• Remarks by IATA’s general counsel at the L. Welch Pogue Lifetime Achievement in Aviation Award dinner honoring Paul Mifsud. This is going to seem a minor note to many readers, but it shouldn’t. Paul Mifsud was KLM’s Vice President of Government Relations in the US for many years and in many ways helped bring about both Open Skies in the US and anti-trust immunity for alliances (he was KLM’s advocate for the very first one, with Northwest).

• Disputes between legacy America West pilots and legacy US Airways pilots coming out of the US Airways-America west merger continue to get in the way of completing the American-US Airways merger.