Zodiac Aerospace said it has shortened average delays in aircraft seat production to days rather than months, as factory congestion which disrupted aircraft deliveries eased. The aircraft interiors and systems manufacturer said it was on track to get its seats business back to normal within 18 months and also reiterated a recently revised target of roughly stable operating profit in its current financial year. CE Olivier Zarrouati, under pressure over a series of profit warnings, said the company was coming out of a "crisis" that could not have been anticipated in a single announcement and that management could complete the recovery. Zodiac said the rebound would be driven mainly by higher volumes and, "to a lower extent", better cost control. It declined to give forecasts for 2016/17. <br/>
general
The world’s airlines have ambitious plans to double the fleet of commercial jets during the next 2 decades as the number of air travellers approaches 7b. The trouble: There won’t be enough controllers to help those 44,000 planes take off and land safely. A shortage of air traffic controllers may rein in expansion by the aviation industry and economic development by emerging nations such as India, which wants to activate hundreds of unused runways to spur growth. There is a potential solution, and it resembles a video gamer’s dream -- a wall of big-screen TVs and a few tablet computers controlled by a stylus. Some airports are now testing “remote towers” from Saab and Thales that allow controllers sitting hundreds of miles away to monitor operations through high-definition cameras and sensors. <br/>
In these heady days for airlines, when they “own” hub cities and can charge US$500 to change a ticket, one might wonder what happened to all the entrepreneurs. The kind of people who sketch route maps on cocktail napkins or split from their former airlines and started new ones. Despite cheap fuel and financing, almost no new, well-capitalised airlines with national aspirations have appeared since the wave of bankruptcies and consolidations of the past decade. And Virgin America, which began flying in August 2007, is planning to merge into Alaska Air Group. It’s largely because the US has become an ocean of whales, with scant space for small fry. Anyone who wants to launch an airline faces high hurdles, given the scarcity of gates and terminal facilities at most airports, not to mention the capital costs. <br/>
At the nation's airports, the TSA is having a bad spring upstairs, but is apparently doing better downstairs. That's because long security lines have become a major problem, with long wait times at various airports and delayed flights for airlines. At the same time, airlines and passengers have benefited from TSA's installation of new inline baggage screening systems at more than 100 airports. "Improvements in technology including the inline baggage systems are not only enhancing the security of travellers but also help with moving people and baggage through more efficiently," said a TSA spokesman. Longer wait times have a series of causes including more travellers, stepped-up security measures, lower-than-expected sign-ups for the TSA's PreCheck program and a hiring pace that has not kept up with the surge in airline traffic. <br/>
A lack of relevant data is hindering efforts to determine and address the level of the air traffic management system’s vulnerability to cyberattacks, Eurocontrol DG Frank Brenner said at the IATA Ops Conference this week. “Is cybersecurity actually an issue for ATM?” Brenner asked. “The truth is that we in the ATM world don’t really know because there is no common platform to exchange information on cyberattacks. What we know so far from attacks that are known, where the victims have shared information, is that the volume of attacks is probably limited. But we need to dig further and the lack of data is not helping us in our analysis.” Brenner said the apparent limited impact on the ATM system at the moment could be “a lot to do with the way our ATM system is currently structured.” <br/>
The Civil Aviation Authority of Thailand (CAAT) has appointed CAA International (CAAi), the advisory arm of the UK Civil Aviation Authority (UK CAA), to help strengthen CAAT’s aviation safety oversight in compliance with ICAO. In June 2015, ICAO “red flagged” Thailand, raising the country’s aviation safety oversight rating to a full Significant Safety Concern (SSC) rating. The CAAi project, which is expected to begin in May this year, will involve a team of around 10 experts from the UK CAA working with CAAT to recertify Thai-registered air operator’s certificates and address ICAO’s SSC. CAAi will also provide on-the-job flight operations training to CAAT Inspectors, to help increase their core inspectorate competencies in accordance with international standards. <br/>