The family of an American mother and daughter killed when a pilot deliberately flew an airliner into a mountainside sued the German airline, its parent company and the US airline that sold them their tickets. The wrongful death lawsuit was on behalf of the husband and son of Yvonne Selke, who was killed along with her daughter, Emily. The two Virginia women were the only Americans on board the plane. The lawsuit was filed against Germanwings, Lufthansa Airlines, and United Airlines,. The Selkes bought their tickets for a trip to England and Spain from United and departed on a United flight from Dulles International in Virginia. The suit alleged Lufthansa and Germanwings are negligent because they didn't have a policy requiring at least 2 flight crew members in the cockpit at all times. <br/>
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German authorities have cleared Lufthansa to wet lease 38 Airbus A319/320s from Airberlin. Under the wet-lease agreement, Airberlin will lease the aircraft—which are stationed at German and Austrian airports—to Lufthansa and its subsidiaries Eurowings and Austrian Airlines. Eurowings will take 33 of the aircraft, enabling it to phase out up to 20 older A320s, and Austrian Airlines will take the remaining 5. The deal also includes a codeshare between Lufthansa and Airberlin equity parent Etihad Airways. The agreement has a 6-year term, which can be extended subject to certain conditions. As is common in wet-lease deals, the responsibility for other services—including flight operation, crew planning and maintenance—remains with the wet-lease provider, in this case Airberlin. <br/>
When an airline’s technology systems fail, the carrier often releases a statement apologising for the issue and promising is it is working to fix the problem. Often, the airline assures customers it is making major technological investments so the issue will not reoccur. But behind closed doors, US airline executives know solving IT issues will not be easy. United CE Oscar Munoz, whose airline suffered an outage Jan 22, grounding its flights for roughly 2 hours, told employees the next day that fixing the industry’s technology infrastructure is not as easy as it sounds. Munoz said people often ask him why airlines don’t update all systems at once to fix these problems. But he likened that to changing all 4 of a moving car’s tires. He said it was impossible to do without temporarily closing the airline. <br/>
SIA is actively reaching out to more nationalities, as it ramps up its cadet pilot recruitment to meet future needs. Industry players and pilots noted that the airline usually hires pilots who are either Singapore citizens or permanent residents. Recent recruitment advertisements for cadet pilots which appeared in online pilot forums state that all nationalities are welcome to apply. This is believed to be the first time that SIA has publicly cast its net wide for cockpit crew. The airline said the majority of its current pool of about 2,000 cockpit crew are either Singaporeans or permanent residents. SIA, which has ordered 67 Airbus 350s that started arriving last year, did not say how many more pilots it needs to hire in the coming years to operate a growing fleet. It takes about 3 years to train a cadet pilot. <br/>