British Airways cabin crew working under ‘mixed fleet’ employment terms have announced a 2 week extension to their current strike. The additional strike days are from Wednesday Aug 16 to Wednesday Aug 30, including the August public holiday weekend. “Strike action will continue until the end of August unless British Airways hammers out a deal with Unite to resolve this dispute,” Unite said. BA said all its customers will be able to fly to their destinations during the current and extended strike days. The extension will mean the mixed fleet crew will have been on strike for the whole of July and August “forcing British Airways to spend millions on ‘wet leasing’ aircraft to cover the striking cabin crew,” Unite said. Unite described a recent offer by the airline to reinstate travel concessions for workers who took strike action as ‘half-hearted’. <br/>
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Malaysia Airlines believes that traffic from China could further drive its business and will launch more new routes to capitalise on that demand. "It is quite remarkable the number of people travelling from China to all over Southeast Asia and that looks set to grow massively over the next 10 years," says the airline's CE Peter Bellew. As part of its expansion into China announced in Nov 2016, the airline will launch 11 new routes by end-2017, representing the most number of new routes launched within a period in the carrier's history. The majority of these routes are to high growth tier-2 cities such as Chengdu, Chongqing, Hangzhou and Tianjin. Bellew adds that MAB will cut capacity on its domestic routes due to the "huge price wars" between the 3 local carriers, and redeploy this capacity on services to China. <br/>
The American Airlines uniform crisis has taken a new — and decidedly more litigious — turn. A law firm filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court in Chicago Wednesday. Two American Airlines flight attendants, Thor Zurbriggen and Dena Catan, are named in the suit as plaintiffs on behalf of fellow AA employees, and Twin Hill is named as the defendant. Dena Catan is the wife of Joe Catan, an AA pilot who famously stood up at a March AA crew and talked of how he did not have a safe environment in the cockpit after he experienced serious symptomatic reactions to the new Twin Hill uniform. Since then, well over 5,000 AA flight attendants, pilots, gate agents and customer service representatives have reported symptomatic reactions to the new uniforms. <br/>