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Emirates, the largest customer of Boeing's upcoming 777x aircraft, wants the plane to be put through "hell on Earth" in testing to ensure it is safe to fly and meets performance expectations, the president of the airline said Tuesday. The testing and certification of aircraft has been under scrutiny after the grounding of Boeing's 737 MAX jet, while problems with a number of models have led some airlines to accuse plane and engine makers of over-promising on performance capabilities. "We need to be absolutely sure that as she comes together, as she starts flying, everything is done in a manner that it should be done," Tim Clark said of the 777x. "I want one aircraft to go through hell on Earth basically to make sure it all works." The 777x will be the first major new US aircraft to be certified since the twin MAX disasters. <br/>

EasyJet said Tuesday it will become the first major carrier to operate net-zero carbon flights, offsetting climate-warming emissions from the fuel used on every flight. Climate experts, however, warn that such efforts are stopgap measures at best and that, with few options to reduce emissions from planes, the real focus should be on flying less. EasyJet said it will offset the carbon “by investing in projects that include planting trees or protecting against deforestation.’’ That is estimated to cost about US$32m across the airline, which last year carried 88.5m people on almost 560,000 flights. The airline described the carbon-offset effort as an “interim measure" while new technologies are being developed, including efforts to develop hybrid and electric planes. <br/>

EasyJet said Tuesday that pre-tax profit for fiscal 2019 fell 3.4% and forward bookings for the first half of fiscal 2020 are slightly ahead of last year. The airline said that for the year ended Sept 30 its pre-tax profit was GBP430m (US$556.7m) compared with GBP445m for fiscal 2018. The company said total revenue per seat decreased by 1.8% to GBP60.81 driven by weakness in consumer confidence. Adjusted pre-tax profit fell to GBP427m, from GBP578m the prior year. EasyJet’s revenue was GBP6.39b, compared with GBP5.90b in 2018. Total passengers rose 8.6% to 96.1m, and the airline said its load factor was 91.5% compared with 92.9% the year before. The board declared a dividend of 43.9 pence a share, compared with 58.6 pence the year before. <br/>

EasyJet is set to step into the void created by the collapse of Thomas Cook and reveal details of the launch before Christmas of its own package holiday business. Weeks after the failure of Thomas Cook, EasyJet is to reveal plans to relaunch its own holidays subsidiary next week. Its move into packaged holidays is the fruition of a plan set in motion soon after Johan Lundgren became the airline’s CE nearly 2 years ago. Reworking its existing offering as a package holiday subsidiary puts EasyJet on the other side of the argument put forward by Michael O’Leary, Ryanair’s CE, who said that the collapse of Thomas Cook showed that the age of the package holiday was dead. Lundgren is understood to believe that a holiday subsidiary will become a “super-ancillary” revenue-raiser for EasyJet. <br/>