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Former partners and rivals of Jet Airways are launching replacement routes and looking for new codeshare partners as they scramble to fill a lucrative gap left by the collapse of the India’s once-largest international airline. Jet, which halted operations on April 17 after running out of cash, had a market share of around 12% on international flights to and from India in 2018, according to government statistics, outstripping even national carrier Air India. In Jet’s absence, cash-strapped Air India is the only Indian carrier that operates widebody jets capable of non-stop flights to Europe and the US, although the Vistara joint venture owned by Tata Sons and Singapore Airlines Ltd has 6 Boeing Co 787s on order due for delivery from next year. With international airfares spiking by up to 36% in May and June according to data from travel portal Yatra.com, Jet’s former partners, Virgin Atlantic and Delta, have been among the first to announce new Indian routes to replace ones previously flown by Jet. “People still want to travel. Foreign carriers are changing their networks and putting more into India if they can,” Association of Asia Pacfic Airlines Director General Andrew Herdman said. KLM and sister carrier Air France will boost their capacity in India by 25% in the upcoming winter season through the use of bigger planes, higher frequencies and a new Bangalore-Amsterdam route from October. Story has more particulars.<br/>

Low-cost airline Wizz Air has delivered strong full-year results, with pre-tax profit up 4.5% to E300m, bucking a recent trend of bad news in the industry. CE Jozsef Varadi said performance was “very solid” and that net profit would rise from E292m to between E320m and E350m in the 2019-20 financial year. But the company also said that unit costs would rise 2% next year, with unit revenues growing in the low single digits. Varadi said that higher fuel prices were driving “weaker carriers” out of the market, which allowed Wizz to increase its market share. Alex Paterson, analyst at Investec, said Wizz’s guidance for next year was “slightly disappointingly . . . below current consensus of E353m”, but he pointed to a “tough environment, Brexit risks and potential disruptions across the summer months”. Varadi said Wizz was better prepared for a “not improving, maybe deteriorating” operating environment — like that which affected the sector last summer — by having spare planes and crews on standby. Strikes and staff shortages among air traffic controllers in Europe last year caused flight delays to more than double to a total of 19.1m minutes. Wizz Air revenue for the year to March 31 2019 came in slightly below analysts’ consensus estimates, up 20% to E2.3b.<br/>

Korean low-cost carrier Jeju Air will launch direct flights between Singapore and Busan on 4 July, and be piloting a new travel class on the route. The airline will fly Singapore-Busan four times a week, said Jeju’s deputy general manager for regional sales Lee Daewoo. Jeju will be the second carrier to ply the route, after Silkair, and the first Korean airline to do so. Fellow Korean low-cost carrier Eastar Jet will be the third airline. The airline has not named a firm launch date, but hopes to do so by the end of the year. Lee says three Jeju aircraft have been reconfigured with the new seating and are based in Busan. These aircraft will feature 174 seats, with 12 “new class” seats four-abreast. This is slightly less than its usual 186/189-seat configuration. Singapore-Busan will be the longest route in the networks of Jeju and Eastar.<br/>

Jetstar has shown interest in the proposed Airbus A321XLR to potentially open up new routes between northern Australia and Japan. Jetstar group CE Gareth Evans says that it is having conversations with Airbus about the longer-ranging variant of the A321. “Its 600nm additional range on the [A321]LR and that can hit markets like Japan and Cairns,” he says. “We have a fairly large operation out of Cairns on 787s today – an XLR potentially could enable us to grow that operation to other points in Japan out of northern Australia so it’s something we’re certainly interested in.” Airbus is expected to launch the XLR at the Paris air show in June, with first delivery likely around 2024. The variant is expected to carry around 220 passengers over 4,000nm. Jetstar has committed to taking 18 A321LRs over three years from mid-2020. Evans reiterated that those will be used to fly on domestic services during the day, while the additional range will allow them to operate overnight services from Australia’s east coast to Southeast Asia. That would allow it to free up some of its Boeing 787-8s used on flights from Sydney and Melbourne to Denpasar to be used on longer routes. Jetstar Japan has also committed to adding three A321LRs to its fleet in 2020.<br/>

Airbus is close to a deal to sell A330neo wide-body passenger jets to Virgin Atlantic, people familiar with the matter said on Sunday. The airline has been evaluating the upgraded A330 model against the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Industry sources have said the airline was looking for about 6 to 10 aircraft. The A330neo sells for $296 million at list prices, but airlines typically win significant discounts.<br/>

Flying Southwest this summer and like to stash your boarding pass in those colorful paper holders they hand out at the airport? You'll have to BYOBP holder beginning June 1. Ticket jackets, as the document holders are called, are going the way of peanuts on Southwest. The airline, which doles out about 22 million ticketjackets a year, is eliminating them to "reduce waste, protect our environment, use less paper and ultimately become a greener company," spokesman Dan Landson said. Southwest is the last major US airline to ditch the ticket jackets, a relic from an era when airlines issued paper tickets. Most tickets are now electronic, and boarding passes have moved that way, too. Travellers who don't fly Southwest, the nation's largest domestic carrier, may not even know they still exist.<br/>