Malaysia Airlines is considering ordering as many as 25 widebody aircraft as the nation’s flag carrier, recovering from two fatal air crashes in 2014, looks to meet growing travel demand. The airline will replace 15 of its aging planes and add 10 to fuel growth, CEO Peter Bellew said Tuesday. It may look at Airbus Group SE’s A330s and A350s, and Boeing Co.’s 787s, with a decision due by the middle to end of next year, he said. “I am short of widebody aircraft,” said Bellew. Besides the current Kuala Lumpur-London flights, “we won’t do other long-haul routes until 2020, 2021 because the aircraft will be available at the right price, at the right time and at the right configuration.” Bellew, who became Malaysia Air’s third CEO in two years in July, is tasked with the job of restoring confidence in the carrier that lost two planes two years ago -- one that vanished over the Indian Ocean and another that was shot down over Ukraine. The airline is likely to become profitable in 2018 before it relists its shares in the first quarter of the following year, Bellew said.<br/>
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Qantas is boosting services across the Tasman, continuing strong growth over the past 18 months as it moves through a NZ$2.24b-plus transformation programme. The airline, which celebrates its 96th birthday today, is starting a new Christchurch-Melbourne service on December 4, in the past month has increased services from Brisbane to the southern city from three to daily. It will also use a larger plane to fly from Sydney to Auckland during the summer peak, moving up from a Boeing 737 to an A330. Qantas has flown here for the past 76 years and the airline's CE of international and freight, Gareth Evans, said it had increased its transtasman capacity by 10% to meet growing demand during the past 12 to 18 months. Evans described forward bookings on the Christchurch-Melbourne service as "unbelievable - It really is exceeding expectations". The airline now flew 11 routes between the two countries and he told a Trans-Tasman Business Circle event that New Zealand was a key partner in its global network. It had been able to increase services by making better use of aircraft, rather than expanding the size of the fleet which serves New Zealand.<br/>