Emirates, the largest operator of Airbus Group's A380 superjumbo, has all but given up on getting an upgrade of the double-decker with new engines and is instead making a more modest pitch to the planemaker: please don’t drop the program altogether. “I can’t force Toulouse to do anything,” Emirates President Tim Clark said Friday. “My main concern is that they stop producing the plane.” Clark has become a marketing champion for the world’s largest passenger plane, deploying the jetliner on both major trunk routes like Heathrow-Dubai as well as secondary airports like Manchester or Barcelona. While new engines would further enhance the model by providing greater flexibility with more range and higher takeoff weight, Clark conceded that talks with the manufacturer regarding an upgrade had “kind of lapsed.” Emirates is by far the largest customer for the aircraft, having ordered 142 in total. Emirates’ concern about Airbus keeping the plane on the production line is driven by the fact that few sizable buyers exist besides the Gulf operator. Airlines including Air France-KLM Group and Deutsche Lufthansa AG have actually trimmed their orders, and most customers have bought the airliner in relatively small numbers. Airbus itself says the production line has gaps from 2018. A total of 319 A380s have been ordered, fewer than the annual output of the best-selling A320 line of smaller planes.<br/>
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Emirates President Tim Clark said British and European passenger growth would probably stall and the euro enter “freefall” should the UK vote to exit the EU in a June 23 referendum. Clark, educated in Britain and recently knighted, said he can’t himself vote after living outside the country for an expended period, but hopes “sense will prevail” and that the instability and volatility of the UK leaving the 28-nation bloc will be avoided. “If the Brits decide to exit the EU the shock waves throughout the EU will be pretty severe,” he said. “For somebody who’s running a business that has very, very high demand in our European countries and cities, to see a destabilisation wouldn’t serve any purpose at all.” Europe accounts for between 30 and 40% of traffic at Emirates, Clark said, predicting demand will temporarily “flatline” at best, compounding increasing uncertainty in the region from an immigration crisis and a spate of terrorist attacks. Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr also predicted that demand would flatten out in the event of a Brexit.<br/>
Azul Linhas Aereas Brasileiras is studying another reduction to its fleet as air-travel demand shrinks to the lowest in four years. The carrier may eliminate eight planes in addition to the 20 it’s cut since November, CEO Antonoaldo Neves said. In addition, China’s HNA Group, Azul’s biggest shareholder, has agreed to take delivery of two Airbus Group A350 jetliners the Brazilian company had expected to receive in 2018. Airlines including Latam Airlines Group SA and Gol Linhas Aereas Inteligentes SA have been cutting capacity in Brazil amid a two-year recession in Latin America’s largest economy. Air travel demand has tumbled to the lowest since 2012 after dropping for the ninth straight month in April, according to the Brazilian Airline Association trade group. “The sector is sick,” Neves said at Azul headquarters in Barueri, Brazil.<br/>
A spokesman for Pakistan's national airline says a fire has broken out at its precision engineering department at the international airport in Karachi and is likely to damage spare parts. A Pakistan International Airlines spokesman says firefighters are working to extinguish the blaze, which erupted early Saturday. He says no one was injured and the incident has not affected flight operations. He says it is not clear what caused the fire.<br/>