unaligned

Southwest quietly took delivery of its first Boeing 737 Max jetliner, cancelling an employee celebration in Dallas to mark the milestone because of the devastation in nearby Houston caused by Hurricane Harvey. The jet’s Tuesday arrival at Southwest marks the first at a North American carrier for the Max, which has shattered sales records at Boeing. Record rainfall and flooding has shut down Houston, one of Southwest’s original markets from the early 1970s. “Respecting that many of our folks can’t get out of Houston or are impacted, it just didn’t seem right to do that,” Dan Lansdon, a spokesman for the carrier, said of the ceremony that had been scheduled for Wednesday. The Southwest jet, with tail number N8710M, landed 16 minutes early, according to Flightaware.com. That’s fitting for the Max, which glided through development months ahead of schedule, entering the commercial market in May with Malindo Airways, the Malaysian affiliate of Lion Mentari Airlines. Southwest still claims the title of launch customer for the Max 8 after placing the initial order in 2011, a role it has served for three earlier 737 models as the largest buyer of the single-aisle plane. The Dallas-based carrier has 200 of the upgraded Max planes on order with Boeing and plans to take delivery of the first 14 this year.<br/>

AirAsia Bhd plans to consolidate its various regional affiliates under one holding company, in contrast to a scattered structure now, as the airline takes off on a rapid expansion path in its core Southeast Asian markets. The Malaysia-based carrier, currently the listed investment holding company and the operating firm for AirAsia’s Malaysian airline business, proposed a share exchange and transfer of listing with newly created AirAsia Group Bhd, or Newco. Under the reorganisation, the investment holding function and the Malaysian airline business will be separated. Newco will become the investment holding vehicle and take on AAB’s listing. AAB will retain the Malaysian airline business and become Newco’s wholly owned unit, the airline said on Tuesday, after earlier reporting record-high quarterly revenues and a plan to expand its fleet by over 20% in H2. “This is a positive step forward as the current corporate structure is awkward. It makes sense to have one holding company that controls all the various airlines and related businesses,” said Corrine Png, CEO at research firm Crucial Perspective.<br/>

David Neeleman, the founder of JetBlue Airways, registered a new aviation business this summer in Connecticut, sparking immediate speculation in the airline industry that he might be starting a new US airline. He is—sort of. Neeleman, 57, is joining a plan to launch a charter air enterprise, tentatively called Azura Airways, using two Bombardier CRJ-200 regional jets with as few as 16 seats, said Trey Urbahn, an industry veteran and longtime adviser to Neeleman. Small jets with 50 seats or fewer have fallen out of favor among U.S. carriers, which have turned to larger regional jets and more mainline flying in recent years. The venture by Neeleman and Urbahn is targeting what they see as an underserved portion of the charter market for companies with regular movements of employees among corporate locations, university sports teams and wealthy people who don’t have private jets. “I’m not starting an airline,” Neeleman said Tuesday. “I’m helping out a couple of friends. It’s not like David Neeleman sees a great opportunity here. We’ll do a couple of planes and see how it goes.” The endeavor’s first flights could occur as soon as October, he said. The effort already has a couple of companies as customers.<br/>

Ryanair is not hopeful that its complaint to competition authorities over plans by Lufthansa to take over parts of insolvent rival Air Berlin will halt the deal, its CCO said Tuesday. Ryanair has filed a complaint with German and European Union competition authorities over the insolvency process, which it describes as a “conspiracy” because it believes that Lufthansa will gain a bigger share of the German market. “This would not be allowed in any other European country, we have of course made a complaint to the German cartel office and the European Commission. We shall see what happens but we are not entirely hopeful,” David O’Brien said. Ryanair CE Michael O’Leary said last week that the Irish airline would also be interested in bidding for the whole of Air Berlin, but O’Brien said the Lufthansa bid would probably succeed.<br/>

Lufthansa Group subsidiary Eurowings will hire 600 crewmembers, comprising 200 pilots and 400 cabin crew members, as its fleet expands to a further 20 Airbus A320s. In addition, Eurowings management has confirmed that temporary working contracts for flight attendants will be changed to permanent contracts. Eurowings employs 1,500 flight attendants. Lufthansa established Eurowings as a pan-European LCC platform in 2015 to operate low-cost flights from several bases outside Germany and safeguard Lufthansa Group’s leading position in point-to-point connections in its German, Austrian, Swiss and Belgian home markets. It had been expected to grow quickly.<br/>

Jeju Air’s operating profit grew by 2,448% in Q2 of this year compared to the same quarter last year, reaching a record high for twelve consecutive quarters, the airline said Tuesday. Jeju Air recorded a Q2 operating profit of 16.2b won ($14.4m) and sales of 228b won, which was a 40.7% jump compared to the same period last year. In H1, the company recorded sales of 468.2b won, up 39.7% from last year, and an operating profit of 43.5b won, an increase of 167.6%. The airline achieved the largest operating profit growth among listed domestic airlines over the past two quarters. As of the first half of the year, Jeju Air reported an operating profit margin of 9.29%, the highest among three listed airlines. Jeju recorded a net profit of 32.1b won, while Asiana posted a net profit surplus of 21.3b won and Korean Air recorded a loss of 200.3b won. <br/>

A Kuwaiti hybrid carrier Jazeera Airways Airbus A320 sustained serious damage to an engine nacelle after it apparently struck a cable holding a military aerostat. The aircraft, approaching Kuwait International Airport at the end of a flight from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on Aug. 27, was said by the airline to “have had a minor mid-air interception with a foreign object.” The airline added the flight continued safely to its conclusion; nobody was injured and the passengers disembarked as normal. It said examination of the airframe had identified damage on engine #2 and repairs were being undertaken. An investigation into the incident is underway by Kuwaiti regulator, the Directorate General for Civil Aviation. Inquiries to Jazeera were referred to an incident report in the Aviation Herald, which said the aircraft, 9K-CAK, was in a holding pattern at around 5,000 ft. at waypoint IVETA when the right-hand engine hit the cable, slicing into the front of the engine nacelle but apparently not damaging the fan blades. Film clips from Kuwait show what appear to be a large balloon rapidly falling to the ground, followed by shots of hundreds of meters of cable strewn across a desert road and people examining the wreckage of the tethered balloon.<br/>