Airbus is likely to win an order for at least 100 jets from Air Arabia with an announcement possibly coming as soon as the Dubai Airshow next week, sources said. The carrier has been considering the order for up to 120 jets, which would more than double its current fleet of 55 narrowbody aircraft, for more than a year. Air Arabia, which has held talks with both Airbus and Boeing and said it would make a decision by January, was expected to select the European planemaker, the sources said. Air Arabia's fleet is currently only Airbus A320 family jets, meaning an Airbus order could provide it with operational consistency. The decision would come as Boeing's 737 MAX jet remains grounded. <br/>
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Armenia's civil aviation regulator has cancelled the air operator's certificate of local carrier Taron-Avia. The country's civil aviation committee says it carried out inspections on the operator and "identified defects". Taron-Avia's operating certificate was subsequently suspended for 6 months, it adds, to give the airline time to correct the problems. "But the company has made a decision to cease operating," says the regulator and, as a result, the committee has "terminated" its certificate. Taron-Avia's schedule indicates that it had been serving Moscow Vnukovo from the Armenian capital Yerevan, as well as Moscow Domodedovo, Samara and Krasnodar from Gyumri. It was primarily operating Boeing 737-500s. Taron-Avia was founded in 2007 and intended to serve demand for low-cost short-haul connections in the region. <br/>
Wizz Air has posted sharply higher first-half profits as it continues to cut unit cost and increase passenger numbers. Across the first 6 months of 2019, the airline carried 22m people – 18% more than in the same period last year – helped by aggressive expansion in its core market. This pushed profits for the period up to E372m, an 85% increase on the first half of 2018. Operating expenses increased roughly in line with the growth in passenger numbers. Although the airline's fuel bill rose by 5.2% year on year, cost per available seat-kilometre continued to tick lower. Safety issues that have grounded the Boeing 737 Max aircraft type have led to capacity problems at airlines across Europe, but as Wizz operates an Airbus-only fleet it has been able to maintain rapid expansion. It launched 76 new routes in the first half. <br/>
Wizz Air is set to receive only half the Airbus A321neos it had planned to introduce in its 2020-21 financial year, the carrier has revealed in its latest fleet plan. The airline had been due to take 19 A321neos over the period, according to the figures given at its Q1 briefing in July. But its updated plan, released with its half-year results, shows only 9 A321neos will arrive in fiscal 2020-21, 4 of them deferred from scheduled delivery in 2019-20. As a result Wizz will have 17, rather than 31, A321neos in 2020-21 but will retain 3 more A320s than it had intended, a total of 70, which will give it an overall fleet of 134 aircraft, instead of the previous 145. Airbus has been struggling with industrial ramp-up problems with the A321neo. <br/>
Wizz Air CE Jozsef Varadi has scorned the pledges of airlines which are committing to becoming carbon-neutral in several decades' time. Varadi spoke during a half-year briefing at which it put its carbon dioxide emissions figure at 57g per revenue passenger-kilometre, claiming this to be some 40% lower than IAG or Lufthansa. "It's great when an airline like British Airways, KLM, or Air France says that in 2050 – we're all going to be dead by that time – we're going to be carbon neutral," he said. "These are the worst-performing airlines." He insists that, regardless of their declarations, they "don’t have the financial resources to sufficiently invest" in the technology required to "change the game". "I think it's a bit of a joke, what they're saying," says Varadi. "Inherently their business model is environmentally-polluting." <br/>