Air NZ has been named the world's second-safest airline. The airline has come out second only to Cathay Pacific in the annual safety rankings released by a European group of airline safety enthusiasts. Germany-based Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Center, or JACDEC, calculates its annual rankings based on aircraft loss accidents and serious incidents where an accident nearly occurred over the past 30 years. Cathay Pacific came in at number one, with Qantas in ninth place. The resulting Safety Index relates the accidents to the RPK performed by the airline over the same time. For the past 3 years Cathay Pacific has sat in the top spot. Last year, Air NZ wasn't included in the top 60 rankings but in previous years the airline has come in at sixth (2015), first (2014), and second (2013). <br/>
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SWISS, which took delivery of its fifth Bombardier CS100 Dec 30, 2016—expects to receive a minimum of 12 CS100s, as well as the larger CSeries variant CS300, in 2017. “We expect to receive at least 1 CSeries aircraft every month in 2017,” a SWISS spokesperson said. She added that for several months 2 aircraft [per month] will be delivered. the spokesperson could not detail how many total CSeries aircraft besides the 12 expected ones will be added to the fleet this year, “but we still plan to have all 30 aircraft by 2018,” she said. SWISS’s first CS300 is expected to arrive in Q2 2017 and will be based in Geneva. The CS300 should enable SWISS to deliver a more cost-efficient operation at Geneva. SWISS originally ordered 20 CS100s and 10 CS300s, plus 30 options. It will convert 5 of 20 CS100 orders into CS300s. <br/>
Facing financial headwinds, Air India is in discussions with public sector banks to seek working capital loans to tide over cash paucity which also caused delay in December salary payments to a section of employees. Despite making an operational profit for the first time in a decade in 2015-16 at INR1.5b, the airline has reported cumulative losses of more than INR7b in the first 6 months of this fiscal. "As long as we have debt and losses in our books, we are bound to have cash paucity. There is a cash crunch currently also and to tide over the problem, we are talking to the banks for some working capital loans," highly placed sources said. However, they said the current cash requirement is just "marginal" and the situation is not so bad that it can hit operations. <br/>
Lufthansa announced Wednesday that it will hire more than 3,000 new staff, mainly flight attendants, this year. The new recruits will join the company’s various carriers in 2017. The bulk of the cabin crew, around 1,400, will be assigned at the hubs in Frankfurt and Munich alone. Last year, in addition to the conventional application processes, Lufthansa also held 6 flight attendant castings. Other divisions of the airline are also hiring. Lufthansa Technik, for example, intends to hire 450 new staff at different locations, while Austrian Airlines is hiring more than 300 additional cabin, check-in and cockpit staff, while other divisions are also looking. Last year, more than 100,000 applications were submitted to Lufthansa's career portal. <br/>