Southwest Airlines resumed commercial service to Houston Saturday in the wake of flooding caused by Hurricane Harvey. That puts Southwest behind United Continental and American Airlines, which started limited service Thursday at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental. Since Aug 24, a day before the storm made landfall in Texas, Southwest has held sprawling, twice-daily emergency meetings. At the Friday morning session, staff discussed the status of aid for storm-affected employees, ferrying crew members to Houston from Dallas and Chicago and ensuring that enough fuel reaches airports even beyond Harvey’s path. “It feels like something we can execute well, and like we have a good shot at being up to full strength next week,” COO Michael Van de Ven said. <br/>
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For more than 3 years, the average one-way fare between Detroit and Philadelphia never dipped below US$308, and sometimes moved higher, topping $385 at one point. But then, early in 2016, fares suddenly started to fall, according to data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. By the end of the year, the average one-way ticket between the two cities stood at just $183. What changed? The primary factor was Spirit Airlines. “Without the low-cost carriers, we would have been looking at a pretty significant downturn in activity,” said James Tyrrell, chief revenue officer at Philadelphia International. Frontier Airlines, another LCC, had also added flights from Philadelphia, Tyrrell said. Without such airlines, he added, “you would have absolutely seen a different pricing structure.” <br/>
A flight from Brussels to Madrid was delayed by more than 2 hours while police searched for explosives after a party of Belgian men started making jokes about being Islamists with bombs. Passengers were evacuated as police conducted their search, officials say. Prosecutors say the men appeared to be drunk as they were boarding the Ryanair flight early Saturday morning. A man in his 50s was taken away and is likely to be put through a fast-track court procedure. All the luggage also had to be removed from the plane to be examined by bomb squad sniffer dogs. Security at the airport has remained tight ever since it and the city's metro station came under attack in April 2016, causing the deaths of 32 people. Ryanair has repeatedly insisted that it will not tolerate unruly or drunken behaviour on its aircraft. <br/>