Qantas Airways agreed to sell its catering division to an Emirates Group business to divert cash to areas such as premium lounges and ultra long-haul routes. About 1,200 Qantas employees will transfer to Dnata, the Australian airline said Wednesday. Dnata, an aviation-services company, will supply catering for Qantas flights for an initial period of 10 years. The transaction value wasn’t disclosed. Qantas has sold non-core assets in the past few years including a military aircraft services division as it focused on bolstering earnings through premium customers and direct flights to far-flung destinations. The carrier’s catering division, with facilities in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, is a capital-intensive operation that requires specialist vehicles to load aircraft and food-preparation sites to be near an airport. Dnata serves more than 320,000 meals a day. The Australian carrier says its catering business produces more than 34m meals annually for Qantas and other airlines each year, equivalent to about 93,000 a day.<br/>
oneworld
Zimbabwe will this month receive two Boeing 777s from Malaysia as part of a deal to buy four of the jetliners and a further eight Embraer aircraft in a bid to turn around the fortunes of the southern African country’s ailing state-owned airline. The government will retain ownership of the used aircraft from Malaysia Airlines and lease them to a state-owned company to be named Zimbabwe Airlines, as the state-owned Air Zimbabwe “develops a credible business plan,” Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa told reporters in the capital, Harare. Air Zimbabwe has debts of about $330m and was banned from operating in the EU in May last year on safety concerns.<br/>
British Airways said cheaper fares were now for sale on certain long-haul routes, launching its new "basic" ticket price in a bid to compete with low-cost carriers on trans-Atlantic routes. BA said Wednesday that a "basic" one-way fare, a ticket which excludes a check-in bag and does not allow customers to select their seat, would cost from GBP175 between London and Boston in the US. That compares to low cost carrier Norwegian's GBP145 cheapest available fare according to its website on that same route. BA is launching the fare in conjunction with its trans-Atlantic joint business partner airlines, American Airlines, Finnair and Iberia, in a move designed to counter rising competition. BA said that the new basic fare would also be available on flights to Oakland, Denver and Philadelphia in the US, as well as some other global destinations, but not yet on tickets between London and New York.<br/>
A smoky smell in the cabin of an American Airlines flight caused its evacuation Wednesday afternoon at O’Hare International Airport. No one was injured, said Leslie Scott, an airline spokeswoman. Flight 3470 from Columbus, Ohio, was scheduled to land in Chicago about the time it actually landed, at 3:31 p.m., Scott said. But as they were landing, passengers smelled smoke in the cabin, causing 64 passengers and four crew members to deplane onto the taxiway, Scott said. From there they were bused to the terminal. The cause of the smell was not known but was being investigated. “The aircraft was taken out of service so that mechanics could check it out," Scott said.<br/>