US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) continued its federally mandated implementation of facial recognition biometric exit technology at US airports this week with new deployments at Las Vegas’ McCarran International Airport and Houston’s William P. Hobby International Airport. Beginning Aug. 8, CBP began deploying facial recognition technology on one daily flight from the Las Vegas to Guadalajara, Mexico, and also “select flights from HOU.” CBP did not identify the airlines involved in the program at either airport, and at Houston Hobby, CBP did not specify the routes. CBP began biometric technology deployments at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport (IAH) and at Washington Dulles (IAD) in June, followed by Chicago O’Hare (ORD) in July. CBP originally tested the technology at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL) in June 2016, as part of a DHS mandate issued in July 2015 to create a biometric entry and exit system to record the arrival and departure of “certain aliens.”<br/>
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Airlines are continuing to pull out of Venezuela, and they have a whole series of grievances including staff held up at gun point, luggage theft, poor runway maintenance and low quality jet fuel. United, Avianca and Delta have either stopped flying to Venezuela or said they would leave the country, while three others canceled flights on specific days as the nation descends into chaos. Colombia’s pilots’ association says its members who have flown to Venezuela have had to deal with contaminated fuel and hours-long delays as the National Guard pulls suitcases off flights to loot them. This week, videos showed an apparent assassination of a man at the check-in desk of a local airline at the airport. “Everything that’s part of the airport’s infrastructure started to get degraded,” Julian Pinzon, the head of security and technical issues at Colombian pilot association Acdac, said. “We started seeing problems in the runway, problems in the aircraft taxiway, problems with the airport’s electricity supply, in the fuel distribution trucks.” The current round of carrier defections comes after routes had stabilized from the previous exodus triggered by the government’s halt of dollar payments, and leaves Venezuelans increasingly cut off from the rest of the world. A flight to Miami in coach class can cost about $1,000, in a country where the monthly minimum wage is about $20 at the black market rate. The nation’s social and economic implosion has turned tasks as simple as busing flight crew to hotels into logistical challenges. Staff who once stayed overnight in Caracas, which is about a 45-minute drive away, took to sleeping in hotels near the airport to avoid the bandit-ridden highway. Even then, they’d get attacked, minutes outside the airport perimeter. Some carriers took to flying crew to spend the night in neighboring countries. Story has more.<br/>
Indian PM Narendra Modi’s tax reforms will encourage more local airlines to service their aircraft within the country, a $704m-a-year business that currently goes to Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. Simpler rules for doing business and scrapping of import duties on equipment and machine parts are benefiting companies that maintain, repair and overhaul planes, Air Works India Engineering MD Vivek Gour said. Air Works services Airbus SE and Boeing Co. single-aisle jets at an airport near the southern Indian city of Bengaluru. Air Works, which is aiming to conduct an initial public offering in three years, is among companies that could benefit from a surge in air travel in India, an aviation market poised to become the world’s third largest by 2025. IndiGo, SpiceJet and other carriers in the south Asian nation have ordered more than $90b of aircraft from Airbus and Boeing in the past decade, which raises the potential of servicing about 1,000 aircraft in the next 10 years. By government estimates, Indian carriers spend about 45b rupees ($704m) annually on maintenance work at facilities in Sri Lanka, Singapore and Malaysia. With the new policy unveiled by Modi last year, some of that business could be lured back to India, benefiting firms like Air Works, Gour said.<br/>
The full-scale commercial launch of the upgraded U-tapao airport in Rayong has been put off again, this time until the end of the year. Teething problems with the 1.7-b-baht expansion, initially slated to open this month, have forced the airport to be delayed by some five months. After the new passenger terminal was put to the test in an intensive trial recently, it was decided some adjustments needed to be made with more time required to put certain facilities in place. "We would rather spend more time perfecting our facility before declaring ourselves fully-commercially operational, because we don't want to open too soon and discover some problems have yet to be ironed out," said Worapol Tongpricha, director of U-tapao Airport Authority (UAA). One problem the airport authority is looking to solve before opening is the passenger flow layout, which needs to be reviewed to ensure domestic and international passengers are separated by a glass "curtain wall" that does not pose a security threat. The launch of the airport has also been delayed by the installation of two sets of aerobridges, which are behind schedule and expected to be completed over the next four months.<br/>
Bombardier is pitching its C Series jetliner for trans-Atlantic operations as the Canadian planemaker pursues a new wave of orders, buoyed by the start of flights from London City airport. The European routes operated by Deutsche Lufthansa AG’s Swiss arm should demonstrate the plane’s abilities to potential buyers and open up the possibility of service to the U.S. that would establish its long-haul credentials, C Series program head Rob Dewar said. The narrow-body jet offers double the range, 25 percent more capacity and a quieter noise footprint than other planes at London City, where flights are limited by a short runway and stringent environmental curbs, Dewar said. The aircraft has performed a test flight from the airport to New York’s John F. Kennedy International hub in a 44-seat, all-business-class layout. “From City you could do many destinations in eastern North America,” Dewar said. “There are many customers now -- more than a handful -- looking at the capability of the C Series for long-range routes, some of them trans-Atlantic.” BA already has a narrow-body operation from London City to New York, though its single-class Airbus SE A318 planes are limited to 32 flat-bed seats and must refuel in Ireland to make the trip because of weight restrictions when departing the UK airport.<br/>