Security guards at Europe’s third-largest airport, Amsterdam’s Schiphol, will hold a 24-hour strike calling for better wages on Sept. 4, unions FNV and CNV said Wednesday.The airport said it was too early to know how it would affect the 200,000 passengers expected to travel through Schiphol that day, but urged the unions and the security companies to solve their dispute. FNV said it expected a large part of the approximately 4,500 security guards at Schiphol to join the strike. “Almost all the guards joined in on the shorter work stoppages and there is a great willingness to take actions further,” union spokesman Mohamed Gafki said. “We have given the airport two weeks notice, so they can make arrangements with airlines and to give the security companies time to come up with a better offer,” he added. The guards at Schiphol have held several shorter stoppages in recent weeks, causing longer waiting lines for passengers but no disruption to flights. The unions said the walkout should affect other, as yet unnamed, locations in the Netherlands. <br/>
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A Maryland Transportation Authority police officer has been suspended after he allegedly took a gun onto an airplane without authorization. xxMDTA spokesman Cpl. Edward Bartlinski told the Baltimore Sun that Sgt. Christopher Lamb was charged with interfering with security procedures at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport. The agency spokesman says Lamb is accused of boarding a Southwest flight on April 26 with his weapon. Lamb was at the airport on personal business. Bartlinski says an MDTA supervisor responded to the gate to investigate, removed Lamb from the flight and confiscated his gun. Lamb was suspended with pay pending a trial scheduled to start on Aug. 30 in an Anne Arundel County courtroom.<br/>
Airline associations have jointly called on the EC to align the EU emissions trading scheme (EU ETS) with ICAO’s CORSIA initiative. The rare unanimous call came from 11 airline associations, spanning every region of the world. In a joint letter, the associations urged the EC to “take all necessary measures” to fully implement CORSIA, removing unnecessary EU ETS overlap and duplication. “The associations strongly believe that the EU ETS monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) requirements for international flights must be aligned with the CORSIA standards and recommended practices (SARPs),” the bodies said. If this is not done, the airlines said they will be faced with two separate sets of rules for monitoring, reporting and verifying emissions. Concerns centre on the risk of overlapping compliance requirements between EU ETS and CORSIA from 2021, when the bodies say national and regional schemes will no longer be needed.<br/>
The FAA sent a team to Vietnam earlier this month to conduct a safety assessment, according to Vietnamese regulators. The Civil Aviation Administration of Vietnam (CAAV) said the FAA delegation was in Vietnam from Aug. 13. Vietnam is attempting to gain a Category 1 safety rating from the FAA, which is required for any Vietnam-based airlines to launch service to the US. Some countries, such as Thailand, have been downgraded by the FAA to Category 2. However, Vietnam is not in this category as it has not been rated by the FAA before. “The FAA will make an announcement if Vietnam is assigned a rating under the International Aviation Safety Assessment (IASA) program in the future,” an FAA spokesman said. “To achieve a Category 1 rating under the [IASA] program, a country must adhere to the safety standards of ICAO.” Vietnam was last audited by ICAO under its Universal Safety Oversight Audit Program in 2016.<br/>
Auckland Airport's underlying profit has climbed 6.2% to $263m. Company chairman Sir Henry van der Heyden said it was a year of solid growth in travel and trade markets given the significant growth in the prior two years, with many new carriers and new routes servicing both domestic and international markets out of Auckland. Net profit nearly doubled to $650.1m, though that was boosted by the sale of the airport's stake in North Queensland Airports. The airport expects moderate underlying profit growth in 2019, between $265m and $275m, and expects to spend between $450m and $550m on capital expenditure in the year ahead.<br/>