Demand for air travel slowed in November from the previous month, muted by the halt of operations by Transaero and strikes at Lufthansa, IATA said.<br/>Demand for air travel, measured in revenue passenger kilometres, rose 5.9 percent in November, compared with a 7.1 percent gain recorded in October.<br/>The 2015 year-to-date increase was 6.7 percent, IATA said in its monthly traffic figures.<br/>
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Airbus beat Boeing in the race for new business last year, swelling its total order book to US$1t, but remained behind on deliveries. Airbus had 1,036 net aircraft orders after cancellations, down 29% from 2014, compared with Boeing's tally of 768, a fall of 46%. Both plane makers experienced a slowdown after two years of heavy orders, and amid concerns over the impact of economic jitters and low oil prices on demand for fuel-saving aircraft. Despite that, deliveries of popular models grew, reflecting industry forecasts of persistent growth in traffic. Airbus hit a company record of 635 deliveries and predicted over 650 in 2016, with new orders again exceeding deliveries. Boeing said last week its deliveries rose 5% to 762, an industry record. Combined deliveries came in a whisker below 1,400, having doubled in the past decade. Airbus plane making chief Fabrice Bregier said the latest data showed the market was "resilient".<br/>
Airbus indicated a change in priorities as its sales chief John Leahy hinted at a possible decision this year to challenge Boeing in the 400 seat market while pushing talk of a revamped A380 to the middle of next decade. John Leahy said any decision to launch a bigger A350 would need to be made this year and that it would have to enter service soon after 2020, which is the entry-to-service date for Boeing's 406-seat 777-9X. "I think if we are going to do it we should do it this year because we don’t want to let Boeing have too much of a run with the 777-9X. They are bringing their airplane out in 2020 and we shouldn't be that far behind them," he said. Such an aircraft could be powered by an upgrade of Rolls-Royce engines already used to power smaller models including the A350-1000, but that is up for discussion, he said. "We need to be as common with what we have got as possible without trying to redesign the whole airplane and it has got to come down similar assembly lines as the ones we have got today," he said, adding it would not entail a complete new development.<br/>
Companies from airlines to retailers in more than 100 countries will have to swell their balance sheets with trillions of dollars under a new accounting rule for leases that should shine a clearer light on debt. Leases allow a company to use an asset in return for regular payments, and are mostly held off balance sheet, making it hard for investors to get a full picture of liabilities without delving into the depths of annual reports. The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) published a new rule on Wednesday requiring leases of more than a year to be placed on balance sheets from January 2019. "It's a major change and will affect around half of all companies, especially airlines, shipping and retail. They will have significantly different financial statements," IASB Chairman Hans Hoogervorst said.<br/>
Airbus pledged to provide customers with 50 of its newest A350 wide-body jets this year despite supplier problems in 2015 that meant it fell short of a delivery target. Fabrice Brégier, head of Airbus commercial, the civil arm of the European aerospace group, blamed the failure to deliver the last of 15 A350s last year on problems at Zodiac Aerospace, a French supplier of seats and lavatories. “They did not deliver on their promises,” he said. “They were in denial. When top management is in denial, this is recipe for failure.”<br/>Both Airbus and Boeing, its arch rival, have a delicate task in managing global supply chains while accelerating production of passenger jets to satisfy increasingly impatient customers. Airlines that enter commitments to purchase the manufacturers’ most popular aircraft now will not receive their jets for several years because the companies have accumulated large order backlogs. However, as Airbus’s difficulties with Zodiac illustrate, delays to a single component can hold up an entire aircraft, resulting in penalty payments to customers. Brégier said he had driven the message home by choosing an alternative supplier to Zodiac for Airbus’s re-engined A330 Neo wide-body jet, which is due to enter service in 2017. “They got a wake-up call,” he said in Paris, at the group’s end of year review.<br/>
Airbus is poised to re-enter the Iranian aircraft market as the international community prepares to lift sanctions that have paralysed the country’s economy. Fabrice Brégier, head of Airbus’s passenger jet unit, said the company had an understanding of future aircraft needs from Iranian airlines and officials, thanks to its existing business supplying certain parts and safety services. “We have made some contacts, yes,” he said. “This is potentially a huge market for Airbus and our competitors.” However, he stressed that commercial discussions had not yet begun as western companies were banned from such talks until a landmark nuclear agreement between big powers and Iran was implemented. This was expected in the next few weeks, paving the way to a lifting of Iranian sanctions. “We are dependent on the resolution of the international negotiations,” said Brégier. “[After that] we would have no reason not to consider Iranian airlines as a normal customer like the rest of the world. We are very strict at applying all the international rules and regulations.”<br/>
More than 3,100 new services across 173 countries were launched by 359 airlines in 2015, according to the latest figures in the New Route Database reported by Airline Network News and Analysis. Less than half of these were already operated by at least one other carrier, while around 1,760 were entirely new routes. European carriers topped the list of airlines across the world for new services, with Ryanair and easyJet leading, having both launched 99 new routes in 2015. Both airlines thrived in a year marked by various terrorist incidents, with Ryanair breaking the 100m-passenger barrier with a total passenger lift of 101.4m, while easyJet reported passenger numbers of 69.8m during 2015. The Spanish budget airline Vueling was a surprising third in the rankings, with 90 new routes launched last year, followed by Wizz Air (85 new services) and the American low-cost carrier Southwest Airlines (77 new services) making up the top five.Other budget carriers among the top 10 for new routes included Allegiant Air in the US, Russia’s Pobeda (a subsidiary of Aeroflot), the Barcelona-based Volotea, Greece's Aegean Airlines and the Berlin-based Germania, while China Southern and China Eastern were the only Asian airlines to make the top 20.<br/>
It will never soar into the wild blue yonder, but the dusty Peterbilt truck parked outside a hangar at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Centre here may represent the future of low-carbon aviation. Perched on steel supports behind the truck’s cab is a 30-foot airplane wing, the kind found on a small plane. Instead of a fossil-fuel-burning engine or two, however, the wing is outfitted with 18 electric motors along its leading edge, each with a small red propeller. The truck-plane mash-up, a NASA project called LeapTech, is meant to test a new approach to powering flight. Technicians and engineers have been driving the truck down a dry lake-bed runway at this desert base at more than 70 miles per hour, the battery-powered propellers spinning as if a takeoff were imminent. “We’re able to simulate full takeoff and landing configurations and measure lift, drag, motor efficiency and aerodynamic performance,” said Sean Clarke, an engineer and a principal investigator on the project. The concept, called distributed propulsion, is one of several being studied here and at other research centres to develop technologies that could lead to completely new and far less polluting aircraft designs. Future planes may be powered by batteries or hybrid gas-electric systems, for instance, and have lighter wings that can quickly change shape to better handle the stresses brought on by turbulent air. Others may eliminate the conventional wings-and-fuselage design in favour of one that blends the two elements, all to further the cause of lower emissions. Commercial aviation accounts for about 2% of the global total of carbon dioxide emitted annually by human activity, or a little less than is produced by Germany. Although manufacturers and airlines have made air travel far more efficient — the Air Transport Action Group, an industry organization, estimates that emissions per seat-mile are down 70% from the 1960s, when jets began operating — the industry’s tremendous growth has resulted in higher total emissions.<br/>