Rumbling Mount Sinabung on the Indonesian island of Sumatra shot billowing columns of ash more than 5,000m into the atmosphere and hot clouds down its slopes on Monday. There were no fatalities or injuries from the morning eruption, the National Disaster Mitigation Agency said. The volcano, one of three currently erupting in Indonesia, was dormant for four centuries before exploding in 2010, killing two people. Another eruption in 2014 killed 16 people, while seven died in a 2016 eruption. Disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said hot ash clouds travelled as far as 4,900m southward. The regional volcanic ash advisory center in Darwin, Australia, issued a "red notice" to airlines. Some 30,000 people have been forced to leave homes around the mountain in the past few years.<br/>
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Mumbai finally started work on a new airport more than two decades after first proposing it, as jets ran out of space to operate in one of the busiest aerodromes using a single runway. On Sunday, PM Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone of Navi Mumbai International Airport, to be built on about 1,160 hectares of land about 35 km southeast of the existing facility. The new airport, expected to handle 60m passengers annually when fully complete, is running behind schedule with problems ranging from approvals to delays in the bidding process. “We are trailing behind in infrastructure given the pace at which the aviation sector is growing,” Modi said. “We are trying to press ahead with the speed of execution.” India has been lagging behind China, Singapore and Dubai among regional hubs in upgrading airports. In 2019, Beijing is due to open a $12.9b facility that will become the city’s second mega airport and capable of accommodating more than 75m passengers with as many as seven runways. In the past two decades, Singapore and Dubai have boosted their capacity, building new terminals and becoming the eastern and western hubs for Indian air travellers. “There are no more slots in Mumbai,” said Sanjiv Kapoor, COO at Vistara, the Indian affiliate of Singapore Airlines. “All the airlines have a hit a wall. It is not good when the commercial capital is not able to add flights. We certainly want to fly more to Mumbai”. The first phase with one runway will be operational by December 2019, handling 10m passengers a year, according to local officials. The airport, first proposed in 1997 and approved a decade later by India’s cabinet, will be built by a joint venture between a GVK Power & Infrastructure Ltd.-led consortium and state-run former monopoly Airports Authority of India. GVK also operates the current Mumbai airport, which has the capacity to handle 40m passengers annually.<br/>
South Korean airlines reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 450,000 tons last year by adding more fuel-efficient planes to their fleets, the transport ministry said Tuesday. Korean passenger and cargo carriers have voluntarily participated in a campaign to cut greenhouse gas emissions since 2010. They have made efforts to cut emissions by replacing older passenger jets with more environmental friendly ones and by making cabin service carts and other equipment onboard lighter, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said. As a result, they made reductions of greenhouse gas emissions last year equivalent to planting 69m trees in a plot of land 49 times bigger than the 2.9-square-km Yeouido Island in southwestern Seoul, home to the National Assembly and the country's leading financial companies. The fuel efficiency of their planes improved by an average of 3.8%, which is equal to a saving of 140,000 tons of jet fuel last year, the ministry said. <br/>
Incheon International Airport has been rated the best service airport for years, but it is struggling to get airplanes to depart on time, according to a global flight information service provider, Monday. In addition to poor weather conditions, particularly in winter, the airport attributes a surge in the number of flights passing through Chinese airspace to its delayed departure record. From December to February, particularly, only half of the airport's flights took off on time. According to the US aviation statistics website Flightstats, Incheon International Airport ranked last among 44 airports for punctual departure performance as of January. The website calculated the departure rate aggregating flights taking off more than 15 minutes later than planned. The average departures from Incheon airport in January were on time in 50% of cases. Such a performance is 38.5 percentage points behind that of the Port of Seattle in the US, which ranks No.1 with 88.5% punctual departures. Such a record is 28.2 percentage points higher than the average rate of on-time departures of all 44 airports combined. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport said a recent increase in air traffic flying over Beijing, China, has influence the departure times from the airport. "Sometimes, the flight path is blocked for several hours due to military exercises conducted by the Chinese air force or we have deteriorating weather conditions and we have to delay the flight for safety reasons," the ministry official said. <br/>
Asia’s icy winter just spawned Europe’s strongest jet fuel market in over three years. The fuel’s premium to diesel, the most-watched measure of market strength, jumped to $2.59 a barrel in Europe on Friday, the highest since December 2014. Freezing weather in Asia is drawing cargoes of kerosene, which is almost identical to jet fuel, from Middle East refineries that were already producing less than normal due to maintenance. That, in turn, is poised to chop shipments to Europe by about a third this month, according to tanker tracking data compiled by Bloomberg. “Asia has been drawing high supplies lately because of unusually cold weather,” said Ehsan Ul-Haq, director of crude oil and refined products at Resource Economist Ltd. in London. “This leads to the airlines in Europe fighting for the same barrel as the people in Asia, who are struggling to heat their homes.” In outright terms, jet fuel actually weakened sharply over the past few weeks because, like every other petroleum product, it tracks crude. And Brent futures slumped between late January and early February. Traders tend to watch jet fuel’s price relative to diesel because refineries can sometimes tweak their operations to switch between the two, and diesel is the more widely traded, making it a key benchmark. The jet fuel market isn’t only being driven by cold weather. Air passenger traffic in Europe grew 8% in 2017, the fastest expansion in six years, according to a preliminary estimate from the IATA.<br/>