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Strong demand for the Boeing 787 among the world’s airlines has created a profitable side-line for Air Canada – selling some of its 787 aircraft and leasing them back. Air Canada sold 2 of its newest planes last year for C$351m and leased them back, recording a $19m gain on the sale, and it expects to sell and lease back more 787s this year, CFO Michael Rousseau said Wednesday. “When we committed to buy these planes from Boeing many years ago, we had negotiated a fairly good price and today’s market is slightly higher than what we had negotiated as a cost price from Boeing,” he said. The airline has sold and leased back 4 or 5 of the 24 wide-bodied 787s it has received so far and will probably sell about 10 of the 37 it is scheduled to receive in total from Boeing when deliveries end in 2019, he said. <br/>

United Airlines is seeing a major falloff in international traffic to some parts of the world. The carrier released its February operations report Wednesday, and the numbers show trans-Atlantic traffic last month was down a sizable 4.1% year-over year. Granted, it was the middle of winter, but the report suggests travellers are not headed to or from Europe in anywhere near the same numbers they were during the middle of winter a year ago. Traffic to Latin America also fell 2.7% year over year. The only bright spot internationally for United was on trans-Pacific routes, where traffic in February rose 1.4% year over year. On the domestic front, the February report also spotlighted the rapidly shrinking regional portion of United's operations. Traffic on United's regional network was off a whopping 8.2% in February compared to a year ago. <br/>