Lufthansa Eurowings arm will start flights from Munich next year to combat rivals such as Easyjet, in a strategy switch that will see the discount unit make its first major incursion at one of its parent’s German hubs. “Low-cost carriers are quite active already,” Karl Ulrich Garnadt, the Lufthansa board member responsible for Eurowings, said Wednesday. While a launch date for operations from Munich hasn’t been set, services will commence some time in 2017, he said. Lufthansa has previously excluded Eurowings from Frankfurt and Munich, where short-haul flights performed by its namesake brand help feed lucrative long-haul trips. While an expansion of the discount division at the expense of the main airline could be opposed by unions and has previously led to strikes, Garnadt said the group must respond to competition in the Bavarian city. While Eurowings will initially offer short-haul flights from Munich, typically requiring four or five jets, long-haul routes aren’t out of the question, he said. Operational issues and a lack of pilots have slowed the roll-out of inter-continental services from Cologne, with flights to Las Vegas delayed until 2017. Eurowings already has a base in Vienna, the main hub for Lufthansa’s Austrian arm, and will station its third Airbus Group SE A320 aircraft there later this year. A fourth plane will be located in Salzburg, Garnadt said. The long-haul business in Cologne will get a seventh A330 wide-body in March.<br/>
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JetBlue plans to increase daily flights from Boston by about 40 percent, including new service to Atlanta as the carrier steps up competition with Delta. In addition to the Boston-Atlanta route starting March 30, JetBlue plans to add flights in H2 2017 between the Georgia city and New York’s John F. Kennedy International airport, Orlando and Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood, Florida, the airline said Wednesday. Delta is based in Atlanta and uses the city as a crucial hub. JetBlue’s plan to expand Boston daily departures to 200 from 140 follows Delta’s mid-August announcement of new routes from the city to San Francisco and Nashville, Tennessee. The New York-based airline’s major presence in Boston and its national brand recognition should increase chances for success in Atlanta compared with an earlier brief tenure there, said Rob Britton, who heads the aviation consulting firm AirLearn. It will face off with Southwest in the city as well as with Delta. “Delta now offers Basic Economy, a lower-tier fare, which they have used effectively to compete with Spirit and other low-cost carriers,” Britton said. “Notwithstanding the recent computer mess, Delta’s reliability is outstanding. So it won’t be easy for JetBlue.”<br/>
A Malaysia-bound AirAsia X plane which took off from Sydney ended up in Melbourne instead after the pilot entered the aircraft's wrong longitudinal position, safety officials revealed Wednesday. The Airbus A330-300 left Sydney en route to Kuala Lumpur on March 10 last year but air traffic controllers went on alert after it began flying in the wrong direction. They radioed the crew but attempts to fix the problem only led to "further degradation of the navigation system, as well as to the aircraft's flight guidance and flight control systems", the Australian Transport Safety Bureau said following an investigation. The pilot, who had been flying A330s for 18 months, decided to return to Sydney but bad weather forced him to fly manually to Melbourne, where he landed safely, it said. "The ATSB found that when setting up the aircraft's flight management and guidance system, the captain inadvertently entered the wrong longitudinal position of the aircraft," it said. "This adversely affected the onboard navigation systems. However, despite a number of opportunities to identify and correct the error, it was not noticed until after the aircraft became airborne and started tracking in the wrong direction." The ATSB also found that the plane was not fitted with an upgraded flight management system that would have prevented the data entry error.<br/>
Christoph Mueller, previously CEO at Malaysia Airlines Bhd., joins Persian Gulf carrier Emirates this month in a newly created position that will see him play a significant management role at the biggest airline by international traffic. The German, who also ran Ireland’s Aer Lingus and former Belgian flag carrier Sabena, starts on Sept. 20 as chief digital and innovation officer, Emirates said. Emirates has expanded to become the world’s No. 1 long-haul airline after exploiting Dubai’s position at a crossroads between Europe and the Americas and Asia, the Middle East and Africa to siphon off lucrative transfer traffic. Still, annual sales fell for the first time in a decade in the year through March as the oil-price decline depresses local demand and the carrier struggles to find worthwhile new inter-continental routes. The executive, who turns 55 in December, was hired by Malaysia Air in March 2015 after its reputation and sales were hit by two aircraft losses the previous year, one involving a plane that disappeared over the Indian Ocean, the other a missile strike on a jet flying above a Ukrainian war zone. His strategy halted losses by recasting Kuala Lumpur as a hub for Asian rather than global travel, while cutting 6,000 jobs and shrinking capacity by almost one-third.<br/>
Ryanair is to base all 50 of its new planes outside the UK as the airline has "much more political certainty in continental Europe" in the wake of the Brexit vote. CE Michael O'Leary described politicians now working on taking the UK out of the European Union (EU) as "headless chickens" who have "no idea where they're going to finish up". It came as the airline announced new routes from its Scottish bases including flights to Lisbon, Valencia, Palanga in Lithuania and Zadar in Croatia from Glasgow Airport. O'Leary said: "We're being very cautious about the amount of capacity we're allocating to the UK over the next two or three years until we get some kind of indication of what Brexit will look like. "It's not because we're annoyed or anything with the UK, but we have much more political certainty in continental Europe than we have in the UK while they're all running around trying to work out what Brexit looks like. None of the new aircraft we take delivery of next year will be based here in the UK and already you can see the Brexit decision is costing real jobs, real visitors are being lost and real investment is being postponed."<br/>
Norwegian Air Shuttle Wednesday said it planned to start flights to Barcelona from four US cities next summer, heightening competition with US rivals to the popular tourist destination. The announcement comes as Delta and others say Norwegian is adding flights that exceed traveller demand, pushing down fares and hurting airlines' revenue. As major US carriers scale back their growth plans in Europe, Norwegian is taking up some of the slack. "It's an opportunity, I would say," Norwegian's CCO Thomas Ramdahl said, suggesting his airline can operate some routes more efficiently than US carriers. "A network carrier could pull out because it's more profitable for them to (connect) through a bigger city rather than having a direct flight," he said. "Looking at (our) flying point-to-point - it will boost the market, and it will also probably steal from the hubs" of major airlines. The Barcelona flights underscore the ambitions of Europe's third-biggest budget carrier, which started New York-Paris flights in July, to rapidly expand its long-haul business from the US. Norwegian is taking advantage of an aviation agreement to liberalise travel between the US and the EU, updated in 2011, which allows airlines from non-EU states Norway and Iceland to fly anywhere between the two blocs. The carrier has also relied on the fuel-efficient 787 jetliner from Boeing Co to keep costs low and cut fares on trans-Atlantic routes.<br/>