Pilot-union leaders at Southwest say it could be February or March before their airline resumes flights using the Boeing 737 Max. That's much later than projected by either Southwest or Boeing. Union officials said Monday that the grounded plane's return will take longer for several reasons, including pilot-training requirements and possible changes to checklists that pilots are expected to perform when something goes wrong with a plane. The Max has been grounded since March after two crashes killed 346 people. Southwest, the biggest operator of the plane, has dropped the Max from its schedule through Jan. 5. Jon Weaks, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, said the union has been uncomfortable with Southwest's timetable. "On our side, we think we're looking at maybe even February or March," he said during a meeting of pilot-union representatives from several airlines. A Southwest spokeswoman said the airline is waiting for more information from federal regulators about timing of the plane's return. "We continue our work on schedule revisions but do not have any new information on timing for MAX return to service," she said.<br/>
unaligned
Flydubai warned on Monday of significant financial pressure from the unprecedented grounding of the Boeing 737 MAX as it reported a 196.7m dirhams ($53.6m) H1 loss. The Dubai state-owned airline, one of the world’s biggest MAX customers with 14 planes from an order of 250, said it expected its fleet to shrink this year as it was unable to replace older aircraft. Flydubai has largely stood by Boeing, which is facing one of the worst crises in its history, though the airline’s chairman said in April it could order jets from rival Airbus as replacements. “We are in ongoing discussions with Boeing, as our long-standing partner, to resolve the unprecedented nature of this grounding and the significant impact it has had on our business and growth strategy,” CE Ghaith al-Ghaith said. The airline expects to have a fleet of 43 aircraft by the end of the year, fewer than the 62 it thought it would have prior to the grounding. Flydubai’s H1 loss was narrower than the 316.8m dirhams it lost a year earlier, while the number of passengers carried was down 7.5% to 5m. The airline had previously said it expected to return to profitability this year after losing 160m dirhams in 2018. A cost efficiency programme introduced at the start of the year had offset some of the impact of the MAX grounding, although it would not be able to fully cover it, it said. “If the grounding continues until the end of the year we expect our performance to continue to be impacted,” Ghaith said.<br/>
Icelandair is axing its US services to San Francisco and Kansas City next year, as part of a network restructuring. The airline says it will discontinue the flights for its summer 2020 programme, citing "commercial reasons". It uses Boeing 757-200s on the Kansas City route and 767-300ERs to San Francisco. The carrier, which specialises in transatlantic operations via its Reykjavik base, is the only operator on both connections. But it competes with multiple transatlantic services from San Francisco, while being the only transatlantic link to Europe from Kansas City. Icelandair has been assessing its route network to improve profitability. But it adds that the review is partly to take into account the risks presented by the suspension of the Boeing 737 Max fleet. Icelandair states that it is analysing "new gateways" as part of the network assessment.<br/>