A Seoul court Friday supported a 45-day suspension on Asiana Airlines as a punitive measure following a crash landing in San Francisco in 2013. The Seoul Administrative Court ruled against the carrier, which filed the suit against the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport to annul the suspension. If the decision is upheld at a higher court, the carrier will have to stop operating on the Incheon-San Francisco route for the designated period. "Asiana Airlines did not train its pilots sufficiently, and this resulted in the accident," the court said. "The carrier may be subject to fines instead of suspension, but the maximum fine will be around KRW1.5b and this is far short of the punitive effect which suspension would bring," it said. The carrier said it would also appeal this latest ruling. <br/>
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South African Airways will cease its operations between Johannesburg and Abu Dhabi from March 1, it said Wednesday. "The decision follows extensive analysis and efforts to make the route sustainable over a much shorter period than anticipated," said the carrier. The airline sought and obtained concurrence from National Treasury after applying for permission to terminate operations on the route. Since Oct 29, 2015, the airline has implemented ad hoc cancellations on the route in order to meet the different demand patterns. An application in terms of section 54 of the Public Finance Management Act was approved by the shareholder this year, authorising SAA to exit the route. SAA will also discontinue the code share agreement with Etihad Airways, due to route network rationalisation. <br/>
It's computer-generated and it's based on analysing tweets, but a new survey has found that Air NZ is the world's tenth most loved airline. The survey by a Florida research company for US charter airline Stratos analysed 1.3m tweets mentioning 70 world airlines between Nov 20 and Jan 9. It "ran a sampling of the electronic conversations through a sentiment analysis algorithm to determine how positive or negative passengers felt about an airline". Korean Air topped the resulting league table with a score of +0.57 on a scale running from +1 (only positive comments) to -1 (only negative comments). Air NZ came tenth on +0.43, behind Canadian charter company Air North, TUfly, TAP Portugal, Air France, Tiger, Monarch, Icelandair and Tarom. Jetstar came eighth from the bottom, scoring -0.05. <br/>
A strike on some of SAS’s Nordic services has been threatened from Feb 22, following a breakdown of negotiations between pilots, cabin crew and the company that hires them. The services, although operated in SAS colours, are operated by Flybe, which won the contract to serve several Nordic destinations in 2015 under a “white label” arrangement. The pilots and cabin crew on the aircraft are not directly employed by Flybe but via a recruitment agency, Global Employer Company (GEC). Swedish pilots’ union SPF and cab crew representative body Unionen say they have been trying to reach a collective labour agreement with GEC since last autumn, without success. SAS said Feb 18 it expected personnel hired by partner companies such as SAS to have a collective labour agreement. <br/>