LOT said Thursday a 2-week strike had ended after management reached agreement with unions. Unionised LOT employees began a strike Oct 18 over changes to employment contracts and another factor was LOT's dismissal of chief union representative Monika Zelazik from her job as flight attendant earlier this year. "Strike at LOT ended with an agreement," a LOT spokesman also said on Twitter. Under the agreement, Zelazik will be reinstated and the unions will not be charged with the strike costs, LOT said. The management also pledged to start work on new salary terms. Since the strike started LOT had laid some staff over work absences and canceled some flights. <br/>
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Air China reported a net profit of CNY6.5b (US$946m) for the first 9 months of 2018, down 20% year-over-year, the highest earnings among the country’s 3 main carriers. Revenue for the 9-month period was CNY102b, up 12% YOY. Operating profit was down 23.5% to CNY95.7b. The lower profit margin was because of increased operating costs, which was up by 19.5% to CNY96.3b. For the first 9 months of 2018, Air China’s capacity (ASKs) and revenue (RPKs) saw double-digital growth of 11.95% and 10.96%, respectively. For Q3, ASKs and RPKs were up 9.5% and 9.2%, respectively. Load factors remained at around 80.3%, down by 0.72 pts. Air China said that, despite challenges posed by the rising costs of fuel and weakened currency, the airline benefited from a strong demand during the summer season. <br/>
South Africa’s finance minister said the nation’s troubled flag-carrier should be shut down, casting doubt on president Cyril Ramaphosa’s stated goal of saving what was once Africa’s biggest airline. South African Airways “is lossmaking, it’s unlikely to sort out the situation, in my view we should close it down”, said Tito Mboweni, an outspoken former central bank governor. The closure of SAA would be a powerful admission by Ramaphosa’s govt that it cannot save one of South Africa’s highly indebted state-owned companies, which are critical to the economy. SAA has not turned a profit for years and has needed US$2b of bailouts over the last half-decade to stay in the air — even as other African state-owned airlines such as Ethiopian Airlines and RwandAir have overhauled operations. <br/>
The EC has dropped an anti-trust case against TAP Air Portugal and Brussels Airlines. The investigation, which began in Oct 2016, focused on a codeshare agreement between the two carriers on their Brussels to Lisbon route. Two years ago, the EC told the two airlines that its “preliminary view” was that the carriers’ codeshare cooperation on the sector restricted competition between them, in breach of EU antitrust rules. A statement of objections from the EC related to the first 3 years of the codeshare agreement, which originated in 2009. Two years later, the EC said Oct 30 it had decided to close the investigation “based on a thorough analysis of all relevant evidence, including information received from the two airlines in their replies to the statement of objections and during an oral hearing, which took place in May 2017. <br/>