The director of a seabed hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 on Tuesday disagreed with a new book's conclusion that the pilot likely flew the plane beyond the search area to deliberately sink it in unexplored depths of the Indian Ocean. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau believes the airliner mostly likely ran out of fuel and crashed after flying far off course en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing on March 8, 2014. It believes all 239 passengers and crew on board were likely long dead inside a depressurized cabin and cockpit. Search director Peter Foley, who coordinated the search on Malaysia's behalf, was quizzed by a Senate committee on theories in Canadian air crash investigator Larry Vance's new book "MH370: Mystery Solved." The book argues that two wing flaps found on islands off Africa in 2015 and 2016 point to pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah performing a controlled ditching outside the 120,000 square km that were scoured by sonar in a A$198m search that ended in January last year. It says Shah's aim was to keep the plane largely intact so it would disappear as completely as possible in the remote southern ocean. Foley, who said he has read the book, pointed to evidence that the plane was not under anyone's control when it hit the water. He said analysis of the satellite transmissions of the flight's final moments showed the jet was in a fast and accelerating descent at the end. Debris from within the plane's interior found washed up on the west coast of the Indian Ocean suggested significant energy on impact, Foley said. "If it was being controlled at the end, it wasn't very successfully being controlled," Foley said. "The flaps weren't deployed," he added.<br/>
oneworld
Shares in Norwegian Air soared Tuesday as investors reacted to a report of renewed interest in the budget carrier from BA-owner IAG . Norwegian’s share price rose 11% in early trade to 278 crowns in Oslo after Spanish newspaper Expansion on Monday said IAG is preparing to bid 330 crowns per share for the Oslo-listed airline, citing unnamed sources. “What we can say, is that it’s business as usual for us, we’re expanding rapidly and sales are good. We can’t comment on the ownership situation,” said Tore Oestby, Norwegian Air’s Executive VP for Strategic Development. “Our crystal clear focus is on the purely operational, and to work on costs and efficiencies,” he added. IAG last month disclosed it had bought a 4.6% stake in Norwegian, but the budget carrier later said it had rejected two takeover proposals.<br/>
UK carrier BA has confirmed that it is leasing out some of the summer 2018 London Gatwick slots that it acquired from defunct UK leisure carrier Monarch Airlines, because it was unable to use them all. BA parent company IAG announced that it was acquiring Monarch Airline’s London Gatwick slot portfolio in November 2017, primarily for use by BA. A BA spokesman said the extra slots have enabled the airline to operate its biggest schedule from Gatwick in more than a decade, but not all the slots could be used. Under the ‘use it or lose it’ rule, slots must be operated, or they will be returned to the slot administrators for reallocation. “Given the very tight timescales involved it has not been possible to use all of the new slots in the first summer season. While we assess our future growth plans to make maximum use of the additional slots for the years ahead, we have leased out a small number of them, which is a very common industry practice at busy airports,” he said.<br/>