Delta said Friday it has ordered 37 current-generation A321 aircraft from Airbus Group SE worth US$4.25b at list prices, a move that will help it replace aging aircraft. The new jets, set to be delivered through 2019, add to A321s Delta already has on order, boosting the carrier's fleet of these planes to 82, the airline said. Airlines typically enjoy discounts of 40% or more on aircraft list prices. The announcement comes a day after Delta ordered 75 CSeries aircraft from Bombardier, boosting the Canadian planemaker's backlog, even as it faces a long road back to profitability. Delta also said on Friday it did not plan to buy Boeing planes in the near future. The Airbus purchase will help Atlanta-based Delta, the second-largest US carrier by traffic, achieve its planned growth while retiring 116 old MD-88 aircraft, which seat 149 people. The new planes can seat 185 people, the airline said. "The order for the A321s is an opportunistic fleet move that enables us to produce strong returns and cost-effectively accelerate the retirement of Delta’s 116 MD-88s in a capital efficient manner," Delta's incoming CE Ed Bastian said.<br/>
sky
Delta’s Ed Bastian, the incoming CEO, said he has seen too many bad bets on the price of fuel for the carrier to start hedging again soon. “The reason we haven’t hedged for the last year and a half is there’s just too much volatility, and we’ve been burned,” Bastian said. “We’ve lost over the last eight years about $4 billion, cumulatively, on oil hedges.” Bastian takes over as CEO on Monday after serving for eight years as the airline’s president under Richard Anderson, who is retiring at age 61. The new chief has said he will continue to look abroad to further Anderson’s efforts to make Delta a more global carrier. Airlines in past years have used contracts to lock in their cost of fuel, which is one of the industry’s highest expenses. This so-called hedging has hurt some carriers in an era of falling oil prices since they paid more under the agreements than if they had bought at market. While Delta will jump back into hedging at some point, Bastian said, the memory is still fresh of locking in a fuel price when oil dropped to $80 a barrel -- only to see if fall to $60 soon after. The airline wouldn’t hedge again “until we saw a point where there was some longer-term stability to know what to expect,” said Bastian. “Right now with the volatility and the cost of a premium to hedge, I just don’t think it’s worth the risk.”<br/>
What if tiny radio waves from your luggage could communicate its location to baggage handlers? Airlines could use that technology to track your bags and prevent them from getting lost or misdirected. That's the idea behind Delta's new program announced Thursday, which uses a technology that's been around for a while called radio frequency identification, aka RFID. By the end of August, the airline will be placing paper RFID tags on passengers' bags at 344 airports, including Atlanta, where Delta is headquartered. Story explains new system. With RFID tracking, Delta expects delivery rate to hit 99.9%. Qantas has used RFID to track bags, but Delta says no other carrier has implemented an RFID baggage tracking program with this specific kind of technology on this scale.<br/>
Air France-KLM Group’s board of directors selected veteran transportation manager Jean-Marc Janaillac as chief executive officer and chairman, succeeding Alexandre de Juniac. Janaillac, 63, has since 2012 has been chairman and CEO of Transdev, an international transportation group jointly owned by Veolia and France’s Caisse des Depots. He previously ran RATP, a state-owned public transport operator that runs most of the public transport in Paris and its surrounding region, the airline said. He also had been chief operating officer of French airline AOM. <br/>