Boeing has agreed to take control of Embraer’s commercial jetliner business, a deal that extends the aerospace giant’s reach into the market for smaller passenger planes. The agreement with the Brazilian company, cast as a joint venture valued at US$4.75b, marks an extension of what has become effectively a global duopoly of Boeing and Airbus for planes with more than 150 seats to even smaller jets. Now, the two aircraft makers are bracing for new competition in coming years from China and Russia, where aerospace companies are working on new single-aisle and wide-body planes Boeing said Thursday that it will take an 80% stake in Embraer’s commercial airplane and services business. Embraer will own the remaining 20%, with the right to force Boeing to buy it out over the next decade. <br/>
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An Airbus A380 jet returned by SIA has found a home with Portuguese leasing firm HiFly, marking a respite for Europe's slow-selling superjumbo after the first 2 second-hand aircraft looked set to be broken up for parts. HiFly and the plane's owner Doric Aviation formalised the deal in time for this month's Farnborough Airshow, where Airbus and investors in the world's largest airliner will be striving to demonstrate that it has a future, industry sources said. Stimulating a second-hand market for the A380 is widely seen as vital to prop up ailing new sales of the aircraft, which seats 544 passengers and costs US$445m at list prices. Many airlines are nervous about investing in such large jets because of the challenges of keeping them full all year round, especially at a time when rising oil prices are inflating costs. <br/>
In the long-running battle over airplane noise, new tactics are emerging to fight FAA flight paths over neighbourhoods, including some of the most affluent enclaves in the nation. Residents have formed protest groups, lobbied city and state representatives, gone to court, sold their homes and moved—and even created a high-tech tool for kvetching, enabling them to register thousands of complaints at the click of a button. In 2013, the FAA’s US$35.6b Next Generation Air Transportation System began implementing changes to flight paths over major metropolitan areas. In some neighbourhoods that are relatively far from airports and where residents say airplane noise was never a problem before, homeowners say the new flight paths are ruining their backyard birthday parties and destroying their peace of mind. <br/>
London Stansted and Manchester airports owner MAG said it sees a relatively easy fix for the potential grounding of flights between the UK and European Union in the event of a so-called hard Brexit. The existing open-skies regime that permits unfettered flying by EU airlines within the bloc could easily be maintained by adopting a structure “mimicking” the status quo, Manchester Airports Group CE Charlie Cornish said Wednesday. “A soft Brexit agreement is certainly preferable and the govt needs to move its thinking forward in terms of aviation and open skies,” Cornish said Wednesday. “But they are aware of it and it’s not that complicated.” Cornish said the U.K. “is such a major aviation market” that he “can’t see” there being an issue. <br/>
in late June, the German Aviation Association (BDL) apologized to passengers in full-page newspaper ads for "long waiting periods, numerous flight cancellations and irregularities" in Germany's air traffic that have plagued the country since the beginning of the year. Although the BDL said it's "working hard to improve punctuality and reliability," the ad included a confession: that "short-term irregularities" will continue over the summer. According to passenger rights portal EUclaim, 15,571 flights were cancelled across Germany between January and June of this year. A further 3,778 took off more than 3 hours late. For the same period last year, the same figures were 8,826 and 2,268, respectively. Eurocontrol expects a 53% jump in delays from 2017. <br/>
Airlines in the Middle East saw passenger demand in May grow by just 0.8% compared to May 2017, the slowest growth across all the regions worldwide, according to the latest report issued by IATA. The slow growth in May comes after regional carriers recorded 2.9% annual growth recorded in April. “The earlier timing of Ramadan this year may have affected the result, but more broadly, the upward trend in traffic has slowed compared to last year,” IATA said. Capacity in May increased by 3.7%, and load factor fell 1.9 percentage points to 67.5%. Globally, international passenger traffic demand rose 5.8%, up from 4.6% growth in April. <br/>