Problems building some of its newest planes and other missteps have hobbled Airbus Group for months and are forcing the plane maker to go full throttle to meet full-year earnings targets. The company is pledging to push more than 208 planes out the door in the last 3 months of the year, an unusually large number, including almost doubling delivery of its new A350 long-range jet. To generate the promised earnings before exceptional items on par with last year's E4.1b (US$4.5b), Airbus CFO Harald Wilhelm said the plane maker will ship more than 670 jetliners this year, or at least 20 more than initially promised. Airbus investors have been anxious that delays on the A350 plane and an updated version of the company's popular single-aisle plane, the A320neo, would cause earnings to fall short. <br/>
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Airbus has conducted the first flight test of its new standard high-bandwidth connectivity (HBC) on an A330. According to Airbus, this is the industry’s first such platform to be flight tested. The new standard will soon allow airline customers to choose from the range of new high-throughput satellite technologies—such as Ka-Band, SwiftBroadband (L-Band) and Ku-Band. The new HBC platform will be rolled out from mid-2017 onward and will rapidly become available across Airbus aircraft families. For this initial flight test, Airbus’ HBC platform was demonstrated together with the new HBC offering from Zii—which is based around Inmarsat’s new Global Xpress Ka-Band satellite network and can offer continuous worldwide high bandwidth coverage for commercial aircraft. <br/>
Plans for a new, third runway at Heathrow airport look set to become embroiled in deeper controversy over costs after the airports regulator said it expected charges to customers to hold steady during construction work. A statement from the Civil Aviation Authority appears to rule out any increases in charges while the runway is built. Heathrow has said only that it will hold prices steady “on average” up until 2048, but that they will rise in some years and fall in others. Airlines pay Heathrow GBP19.33 per departing passenger, which adds to the price of tickets. IAG, which is the biggest user of Heathrow, has warned that if the charge rises further, it will be uneconomic for many passengers. Airlines have demanded that Heathrow’s shareholders finance the GBP16.5b cost of building a third runway and that charges to users should not rise. <br/>