A suspected suicide bomber who blew a hole in the fuselage of a Daallo Airlines plane last week and forced it to make an emergency landing in Mogadishu was meant to be on a Turkish Airlines flight, Daallo's CE said Monday. The bomber was sucked out of the plane through the 1-metre-wide hole when the blast ripped open the pressurized cabin in flight, officials said. The pilot landed the plane in the Somali capital, from where it had taken off. No group has so far taken responsibility for the attack but US officials said Monday the US suspects Islamist militant group al Shabaab, which has links to al Qaeda, was responsible for the blast. Daallo Airlines CE, Mohamed Yassin, said most of the passengers who were on the bombed flight were scheduled to fly with Turkish Airlines, but were flown to Djibouti by one of his planes after the Turkish carrier cancelled its flight, citing bad weather. "That particular passenger (who was behind the blast) boarded the aircraft on a Turkish Airlines boarding pass and was on the list for the Turkish Airlines manifest," Yassin said. Yassin said Daallo picked up the 70 stranded Turkish Airlines passengers to fly them to Djibouti, including the suicide bomber. In total, the flight had 74 passengers. Turkish Airlines spokesman Yahya Ustun confirmed the carrier had canceled a flight to Mogadishu last week due to bad weather and said the company will not make any further comment.<br/>
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Japanese airline passengers are voting with their feet since the opening of a new bullet-train route. The number of passengers flying to Komatsu airport in Ishikawa Prefecture, the seventh-busiest route operated by ANA, dropped as much as 50% after a new rail link opened last March from Tokyo to the prefectural capital of Kanazawa, which the airport serves, according to figures from the nation’s largest airline. With the bullet train shortening travel time to Kanazawa to as little as 2 hours 28 minutes, from as long as 3 hours and 51 minutes, ANA will slash flights to Komatsu airport by a third starting next month.<br/>
Air New Zealand has doubled its capacity for flights to and from Rotorua and Auckland, and is promising cheaper fares for travellers. In February last year Air New Zealand started moving from using all 19-seat Beechcraft aircraft between Rotorua and Auckland to a mix of Beechcraft and the larger 50-seat Bombardier Q300 aircraft. From Tuesday, the route will move to all scheduled 50-seat services - offering 2000 seats a week, which is double the capacity on the route when the airline operated Beechcraft only flights. According to an Air New Zealand spokesperson the last scheduled Beechcraft 19-seater service on the route flew out yesterday afternoon. "By operating larger aircraft on the route we have been able to reduce average fares by 15 per cent over the past year," the spokesperson said.<br/>