The US FAA said Thursday it would allow US airlines and codeshare partners to resume flights at three Ukrainian airports and over parts of the Black Sea, citing improved safety and security in parts of Ukraine. The FAA had barred flights over the war zones of Crimea and the Ukraine in April 2014, and expanded prohibitions after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down while it flew over eastern Ukraine, killing nearly 300 people on board. The FAA said in a notice filed on a government website it would maintain prohibitions on flights over the Crimea and parts of Ukraine. The air safety agency said it would allow takeoffs and landings at Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia international airports in Ukraine, saying operations could be conducted with “minimal additional risk.” The FAA said security and safety conditions “have sufficiently stabilized in certain regions of Ukraine” to allow for additional flight operations. There have been over two years of safe flight operations on Black Sea air routes by non-US airlines, prompting the change, it said. The FAA said it was allowing flights to the three additional Ukraine airports, including one serving Ukraine’s second-largest city Kharkiv, because it believed there was enough of a “buffer from the area of fighting and associated weapons capabilities.”<br/>
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The Association of Asia-Pacific Airlines (AAPA) forecasts another profitable year for the region’s airlines, but sees a number of challenges in the way of continued growth. At its Assembly of Presidents event in South Korea, the association listed sustained economic growth and a growing middle class as headwinds propelling the region’s carriers. Asia-Pacific carriers have met the growth in in the region’s travel industry with modern aircraft, new cabin innovations, and customer service improvements. It notes that the region's airlines carried 8% more international passengers during the first eight months of 2018, compared with a year earlier, while air cargo grew 4.8%. It warned, however, that this pace is lower than in 2017, owing to trade tensions between major countries. Rising fuel costs and currency fluctuations are also issues, however carriers will enjoy a fourth consecutive year of profits. "Air transport is widely recognised as a key contributor to economic and social development, built around strong global networks offering both passenger and air cargo services,” said AAPA DG Andrew Herdman. “The dynamic airline sector epitomises the way in which region's carriers are at the forefront of global air transport industry development. Working together as a community, AAPA is determined to tackle the numerous challenges that face the industry."<br/>
The ubiquitous black boxes on airliners -- designed to capture the sometimes gruesome words and sounds leading up to crashes -- need an upgrade, US accident investigators say. In too many cases, the current two hours of sound on the cockpit voice recorders hasn’t been enough to aid investigations, the NTSB said in a recommendation posted to its website Thursday. The board cited several dozen instances in which the recorders were overwritten before they could be brought into the lab. Investigators want the requirement to be increased to 25 hours of sound, and are seeking retrofits for current aircraft by 2024. The 2017 case of an Air Canada flight that came within feet of striking other planes on the ground in San Francisco illustrates the issue. In that case, the plane’s black box recorders weren’t pulled immediately, so the potentially critical recording of the incident was lost, hampering the NTSB’s probe. In a 2009 case, after pilots on a flight to Minneapolis from San Diego went silent for more than an hour and flew past their destination, the recording device provided little help because the relevant portion was recorded over later in the flight, NTSB said. The crew said they became distracted, but the recording would have shed more light on what happened. Investigators cited 34 cases from 2002 to the present in which longer recordings might have helped investigators. “Data continue to be overwritten and are unavailable for safety investigations,” NTSB said in a letter to the FAA.<br/>