Air Canada said Wednesday it will launch a direct Seattle-Montreal service in May 2020 with its new A220-300 jets, as the carrier eyes new routes to expand its share of lucrative international transit traffic to and from the United States. Airbus’s smallest commercial jet, expected to enter Air Canada’s fleet in December with its first delivery, will help the carrier open new routes and increase capacity to cities that lack enough traffic to warrant a larger plane, Canada’s largest carrier said. “The economics that come with this aircraft allow Air Canada to open new routes that you couldn’t serve profitably,” said Mark Galardo, the Montreal-based carrier’s vice president of network planning. Air Canada will use the fuel-efficient 137-seat jet, developed by Bombardier, to help attract US passengers flying through its Canadian hubs, Galardo said. The Montreal-Seattle route, starting May 4, will allow US passengers to connect to destinations in Europe and North Africa. “Part of our business case for the route is having some Seattle-to-Europe traffic (connect) via Montreal,” Galardo said. Air Canada also said it will begin A220 service on May 4 between Toronto and San Jose, California.<br/>
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When he heard about the crash, Ethiopian Airlines captain Bernd Kai von Hoesslin said he felt a wave of anger, then nausea. It was March 10 when the Ethiopian 737 Max 8 went down and von Hoesslin was in a West Africa hotel between flights. He said he called his crew into a private corner of a restaurant and warned them there would be no survivors. But the pilot also felt a sense of responsibility. For months, he said, he had been pleading with fellow pilots and managers to do more to understand potential risks of a new 737 Max flight control feature that malfunctioned in one of the Boeing Co. jetliners that had gone down months earlier off the coast of Indonesia. “When I saw it was a Max, already I’m just thinking ‘Jesus,’” von Hoesslin said in his first interview since leaving the airline and Ethiopia after the crash. Even in those early hours, he said, he feared it had been triggered by the same automated flight control feature involved in the earlier Indonesian crash. “Of course I was mad, too," von Hoesslin recalled of his crew briefing. The Canadian citizen born of German parents spoke at length in a series of interviews at his lawyer Darryl Levitt’s suburban Toronto office and over the phone. He spoke about the accident, what he called his attempts to conduct his own investigation and his experiences at the airline. He also shared hundreds of pages of emails, video recordings and other documents he says reflect safety concerns he raised with the airline and others. Ethiopian Airlines hasn’t disputed the authenticity of the emails but calls von Hoesslin’s allegations “false and factually incorrect." The airline did notify its pilots after Boeing, in the wake of the prior crash of an Indonesian-based Lion Air jet, issued a safety bulletin about the malfunctioning flight control system. It says it strictly complies with all global safety standards and regulatory requirements and was one of the first airlines in the world to purchase a 737 Max flight simulator for training. In a July 26 email, Ethiopian Airlines spokesman Asrat Begashaw called von Hoesslin “a disgruntled ex employee pilot who is fabricating all kinds of false allegations against his former employer to mislead the public at large.”<br/>
TAP Portugal will terminate services to London City airport from Lisbon and Porto at the end of October. The airline blames the move on uncertainties in demand associated with Brexit and lower than expected results on the routes, it says. However, the lost seats will be partially offset in peak seasons by allocating larger aircraft on TAP’s services to Heathrow and Gatwick. TAP launched flights to London City from Lisbon in 2017 and from Porto in 2018, using 100-seat Embraer 190 aircraft. London City to Lisbon currently operates with 12 TAP flights per week, against six on the route to Porto. London City airport says it is "disappointed" that TAP was taking the action, but that is a consequence of overcapacity on the two routes.<br/>