German pilots' union Vereinigung Cockpit said Thursday it wanted more information from Lufthansa before it could decide whether to revive failed pay talks, meaning more strikes could be on the cards at any time. Lufthansa pilots have been out on strike for six days in total since the latest round of protests started on Wednesday last week, grounding 4,460 flights and affecting more than 525,000 customers at one of Europe's largest airlines. To halt the strikes, Lufthansa said this Wednesday it had dropped demands for pilots to work longer hours in exchange for a wage increase. It is offering to raise pilots' pay by 4.4% in two instalments in 2016 and 2017 and make a one-off payment worth 1.8 months' pay. But the union said it had not received a formal notification from Lufthansa about the one-off payment, nor was it clear whether the demands for concessions in exchange for higher pay were really off the table. "VC expects a firm and clear offer in order to be able to determine whether to resume talks, with a mediator or not," it said Thursday. A spokesman for Lufthansa said the carrier would discuss the points raised with the union directly, promising to do so "promptly". VC has called for an average annual pay rise of 3.7% for 5,400 pilots over a five-year period backdated to 2012. Lufthansa returned to a normal schedule on Thursday, though 40 flights were cancelled as the airline recovered from a strike in the previous two days.<br/>
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ANA Holdings Inc. invested in PD Aerospace Ltd., a Japanese company developing a craft to take people into space as early as 2023 that aims to be a potential rival to Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic Ltd. The airline, Japan’s largest by sales, invested 20.4m yen ($179,000) into PD Aerospace in October, while H.I.S. Co., the nation’s largest publicly listed travel agent by sales, invested 30m yen at the same time, the companies said in a joint statement with PD Aerospace Thursday. PD Aerospace, founded in 2007, is vying with billionaire Branson’s commercial space company Virgin Galactic and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin to ferry individuals to the edge of space in reusable craft. The Japanese company is first developing a smaller unmanned craft and will next build a ship capable of carrying as many as eight people 100 kilometers (62 miles) above the earth. “We need bigger investments in the future,” PD Aerospace President Shuji Ogawa said in Tokyo. Creating a space craft is “taking longer than planned because we didn’t have the funds,” he said. The company is aiming to start commercial flights with a manned craft in December 2023, it said in the statement. Its website listed 2020 as the targeted year.<br/>
United’s much talked-about Polaris business-class program for intercontinental travellers kicked off Thursday. Customers will have to wait until next year for the first of United's new Polaris business-class seats to begin flying, but other elements of the carrier's new Polaris upgrade begin rolling out today. The first is the airline's new United Polaris lounge at Chicago O'Hare, which opened to eligible fliers on Thursday. In the air, passengers will need to wait longer for the new lie-flat, all aisle-access Polaris seats, but United's new upgraded "Polaris" service will roll out Thursday ahead of the actual seats. As for the actual seats, they'll debut on the carrier’s new and retrofitted aircraft in early 2017. They'll appear first on Boeing 777-300ER aircraft and then on Boeing 787-10 and Airbus A350-1000 aircraft. The new upgraded business-class seats will also be included as part of retrofits to United's Boeing 767-300 and 777-200 widebody planes. But United is touting its new Polaris service as more than just a seat, calling it a "complete re-imagination of business class flying.” That includes the lounge in Chicago, the first of nine United plans to open worldwide. The Chicago lounge is located in O'Hare's Terminal 1, near gate C18.<br/>