Warren Buffett used to call the airline industry “a death trap for investors”, but the world’s most famous stockpicker has spent more than $1.2b building stakes in four US airlines, he said Monday. Disclosure of the investments by Buffett’s holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, caused shares in the four companies — United Continental, American Airlines, Delta and Southwest — to rise sharply in after-hours trading. The news raised Buffett-watchers’ eyebrows, too. Buffett has not only eschewed airline stocks for years; he has actively disparaged an industry where intense competition, high labour costs and volatile fuel prices have caused repeated rounds of bankruptcies. According to a regulatory filing, Berkshire had amassed a $797m stake in American Airlines as of September 30, along with $238m in United Continental and $249m in Delta. The Southwest stake was purchased after the end of Q3 and was not included in the filing. Buffett revealed the existence of the Southwest stake in an interview with CNBC following publication of the filing. “I’d feel terrible if the story the next day was why wasn’t Southwest included,” he said. He declined to discuss the investment thesis behind the stakebuilding by Berkshire, where he now shares investment responsibilities with two other fund managers, Todd Combs and Ted Weschler. At Berkshire’s annual meeting in 2013 Mr Buffett told attendees that the airline industry was a “death trap”, saying: “Investors have poured their money into airlines for 100 years with terrible results.” Buffett had sworn off airline stocks since suffering heartburn on an investment he made in US Airways in 1989.<br/>
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Honda Aircraft is planning to ramp up production of its HondaJet business aircraft as orders increase. Honda will increase output to 80 aircraft per year from the 36 currently produced. The company has taken orders for around 100 of the US$4.5m jets. Honda Aircraft CE Michimasa Fujino said that “By the end of the 2018 financial year, we want to be near complete production of around 80 units.” Honda delivered the first HondaJet in December 2015 after it received FAA type certification.<br/>
The bodies of Poland’s former president and his wife were exhumed Monday evening as part of an investigation into an April 2010 plane crash in Russia that killed the couple — after years of speculation, backed by little evidence, that the crash was not an accident. Over the next two months, prosecutors appointed by Poland’s right-wing governing party plan to examine the remains of 83 of the 96 people who died in the crash, starting with the former president, Lech Kaczynski, and his wife, Maria. The couple’s bodies were interred in a crypt in a cathedral in Krakow, near the tombs of Poland’s kings and heroes like the military commander Thaddeus Kosciuszko and the poet Adam Mickiewicz. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the former president’s twin brother and the leader of the ruling Law and Justice Party, was on hand for the ceremony, at the Wawel Cathedral. The party has long insisted that investigations by Poland’s former government and the Russian authorities failed to unearth the true cause of the crash. Reopening the investigation was one of the first acts of the new government after assuming power a year ago.<br/>