United Continental Holdings expects to cut some management employees as it deepens efforts to reduce bureaucracy and catch up with the profit margins of industry leader Delta Air Lines. The carrier will “continue to finalise the remainder of our management team” after overhauling its roster of corporate officers last year, according to a Jan 6 memo from executive VP Mike Bonds to employees. The reduction won’t affect “front-line employees,” he said, referring to a group that typically includes pilots, flight attendants and customer-service and gate agents. “While this will allow us to be more productive as we continue to drive and deliver on our strategy, it also means we expect an overall reduction in our management and administrative team,” Bonds said in the memo. <br/>
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United Airlines has decided to retire its remaining 20 Boeing 747-400s by the end of 2017, moving up the fleet’s retirement by a year. United had previously said it would retire its 747 fleet by the end 2018. But president Scott Kirby said Jan 11 that “the time has come to retire our 747 fleet from scheduled service,” adding, “we plan to operate our last 747 flight in Q4 of this year.” Kirby called the fleet’s retirement “a bittersweet milestone,” noting that the 747 “once represented the state-of-the-art in air travel.” United has operated the 747 since 1970, when it started flying the aircraft between California and Hawaii. United’s future widebody fleet will be comprised of 787s, the 777-300ER, and the Airbus A350-1000, of which the airline has 35 on order with deliveries set to start in 2018. <br/>
SIA says it is encouraged by support for its Canberra flights despite its first full month garnering few visitors to Canberra. The federal govt's latest international flight data showed 6995 people travelled in and out of Canberra on SIA's Capital Express route in October. This translated to an average of about 145 passengers travelling to Canberra on each 266-seat Boeing 777-200 from Singapore and just 67 on the same sized plane from Wellington. The outbound figures were similarly low. An average of 65 passengers on each flight from Canberra to Wellington boarded in the capital while the Singapore route saw 111 Canberra outbound passengers. The Singapore flights were a slight improvement on September's numbers, when an average of 142 passengers from Singapore travelled to the capital. <br/>
Improving December metrics for US airlines bode well for their peers north of the border, particularly Air Canada. Following Delta Air Lines' report last week and Southwest Airlines’ release Tuesday, both United Air Lines and American Airlines Group unveiled better close-in yields after the bell Tuesday. Doug Taylor, an airlines analyst at Canaccord Genuity, thinks the ongoing trend of positive data points from US network carriers as having a positive read-throughs for Canadian airlines. Taylor expects Air Canada to see the biggest benefit, since it has more in common with US network carriers. However, the analyst noted that both Air Canada and WestJet Airlines have seen their trading discount to US peers widen on an EV/EBITDAR basis, despite recent rallies in both stocks. <br/>
Post flight data firm FlightStats' report that ranked Air India as the world’s third worst airline, Air India CMD, Ashwani Lohani Wednesday said the carrier has legacy issues unlike other airlines. “No other airlines has had a merger - of Air India (International) with Indian Airlines (domestic) which happened in 2006 -- like ours. There are problems and it continues. All these takes time to get it sorted,” he said, adding that the carrier has 9 different types of aircraft, that makes it operations tougher, unlike most other carrier. Unperturbed by criticism over its poor On-Time Performance, Lohani said the airline is committed towards improving it’s OTP and that there are other things like high quality service that the airline would focus on. <br/>