United Airlines has been named Eco-Airline of the Year by Air Transport World. The award recognises an airline in global commercial aviation for its environmental action within the company and in the larger airline industry. United nabbed the honour for multiple initiatives in 2016 and previous years. Among those initiatives was a move to use commercial-scale volumes of sustainable aviation biofuel for regularly scheduled flights. United also invested US$30m in alternative aviation fuels developer Fulcrum BioEnergy, representing the single-largest investment by any airline globally in alternative fuels. United also partnered with Clean the World organisation to repurpose items from the carrier's international premium cabin amenity kits and donate them to those in critical need of such products. <br/>
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United Airlines president Scott Kirby says the economics of a 100-seat aircraft “just don’t work” for the carrier’s mainline fleet. “We basically need to spread mainline costs over the greater number of seats in the bigger airplanes,” he said. United is in the midst of a fleet review covering both its existing aircraft and order book. Moves since the review began include converting its order for 65 Boeing 737-700s to larger variants and accelerating the retirement of its 20 remaining Boeing 747-400s to Q4. Prior to Kirby's joining the airline in Aug 2016, executives repeatedly discussed a need for a small mainline narrowbody aircraft to close the gap between the 76-seat regional jets in its feeder fleet and the smallest mainline aircraft with around 128 seats. <br/>
Passenger revenue in the first 6 months of Air NZ's financial year has fallen sharply, even when the impact of foreign exchange fluctuations are eliminated. The airline said for the financial year to date, short haul passenger revenue through its preferred metric had fallen 6.3%, while long-haul passenger revenue had slumped 14.3%. Air NZ's preferred metric is passenger revenue divided by the total capacity for the period or RASK. When foreign exchange is eliminated, group-wide RASK fell 9.3%, while yields fell 7.9%. For the month of December, Air NZ flew 1.59m people, an increase of 5.4% on the year earlier, although its aircraft weren't as full as a year earlier, with 83.5% of all seats sold, down 1.5% Dec 2015. This was mainly due to a fall in sales on flights to Asia, Japan and Singapore. <br/>
Austrian Airlines plans to add 4X-weekly Vienna-Shiraz (Iran) services from July 2. The flight will be operated with Airbus A320 aircraft and do an interim stopover in Isfahan. In addition to existing services of up to 14 weekly flights from Vienna to Teheran Imam Khomeini International, the carrier is expanding its portfolio of destinations in Iran to 3 cities. “No other airline in Western Europe offers 18 weekly flights to Iran. Here we are number one,” CCO Andreas Otto said. The airline operates single-aisle A320 family aircraft to all 3 destinations in Iran compared to other European carriers, which mainly use widebodies on Teheran routes. “For 10 years we have had a codeshare agreement in place with Iran Air. This will also be implemented to Shiraz,” an Austrian spokesperson said. <br/>