As a powerful winter storm continued to rage over the weekend with a nor'easter forming off the New England coast and the Midwest expecting more heavy snow, airlines are offering waivers to their customers. As of 11:59 p.m. EST, 921 flights within, into or out of the United States on Sunday have been cancelled, with an additional 7,722 delays, according to flight-tracking service FlightAware. The National Weather Service said the weekend winter storm could make travel impossible in some places. Six to 12 inches of snow was expected from northeast New Jersey to Connecticut, with "impactful amounts of snow" Sunday into Monday in Boston and the interior of New England. And it's a busy travel weekend. Dec. 1 is likely to be American Airlines' second-busiest day of the year, spokesman Ross Feinstein told USA TODAY. From Nov. 30 through Dec. 3, American Airlines had more than 27,000 departures scheduled with more than 2.6 million customers. Feinstein said the airline has issued a travel alert for more than 40 airports, including its New York and Philadelphia hubs. The waivers that airlines, including American, are issuing give travellers who have booked flights on specific dates heading to and from certain cities the option to change or cancel their flights for no fee during the storms. Story has full list.<br/>
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As the peak holiday season ramps up for online retailers and shipping companies, cargo pilots that fly packages for Amazon, UPS and FedEx are pushing to work under the same rules as passenger pilots, a change that the industry says could pose safety hazards by abrupt schedule changes. But some lawmakers think otherwise and are backing a single standard. After lobbying from the package-delivery industry, cargo pilots were excluded from new rest requirements for pilots that took effect in 2014. Those rules required a minimum of 10 hours of rest for passenger pilots in between flights. Rest requirements for cargo pilots remained at eight hours. Three House lawmakers — Reps. John Katko, R-N.Y., Salud Carbajal, D-Calif. and Matt Cartwright, D-Pa.— last week introduced the Safe Skies Act that would bring cargo pilots under the same rules as passenger pilots. A similar bill was reintroduced in the Senate earlier this year. Several unions, including those representing pilots at UPS and FedEx, are urging lawmakers to make the change. Some say a change is overdue. Robert Sumwalt, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said the taxing job of flying long hours and crossing of multiple time zones pose concerns about cargo-pilot fatigue.<br/>
Berlin’s much-delayed new airport has a new opening date: Oct. 31, 2020. That is nine years later than the date envisioned when construction started in 2006. The operator of the German capital’s airports announced the date on Friday. The new BER airport has defied all cliches of German efficiency: construction problems and technical delays saw the date pushed back repeatedly — most dramatically in 2012, when the opening was canceled just four weeks before it was supposed to happen. The delays have left Berlin relying on two small, aging and increasingly crowded Cold War-era airports: Tegel, which served West Berlin, and Schoenefeld, just outside the city limits, which was communist East Berlin’s airport. The operator had previously said that it aimed to open the new airport next October but had stopped short of committing itself to a specific date. Airport boss Engelbert Luetke Daldrup said that the move to the new airport will be phased. Flights to and from Tegel, the busier of the existing two airports, are scheduled to end on Nov. 8, 2020, but airlines will continue to use the existing Schoenefeld terminal, across the tarmac from the new airport, for some time. “We still have 11 months of hard work in front of us,” Luetke Daldrup said. A test phase of systems at the airport will run from April to October, “then BER can be opened safely and reliably,” he added.<br/>
Auckland Airport has installed new scanning equipment that increases international departures processing capacity five-fold. Twelve new automated pre-security gates scan boarding passes to grant passengers to security areas rather than have them checked manually. The new equipment is part of a move to more automation at the international terminal where up to 7000 people can be processed every hour. Auckland Airport's general manager of operations Anna Cassels-Brown said the technology transformation that could eventually include biometric authentication to enable seamless journeys from check-in to boarding the aircraft. "Where possible we see automation as a key way to improve the airport system by being more accurate, reliable and faster." She said the fundamental requirements of passenger processing were not going to change. "We still need check-in, baggage drop, customs and security screening. But what technology can do is allow us to link the process together and streamline information in the background, helping to make the experience as seamless as possible." The new scanners have been developed with Vision-Box, a multinational technology company with its headquarters in Lisbon, Portugal.<br/>
Airbus has dismissed 16 employees without notice in relation to an investigation into the potential misuse of client documents, a spokesman for the group said on Sunday, confirming a newspaper report. Munich prosecutors launched the investigation in September after the company notified the authorities about potential irregularities involving the documents, which relate to two German procurement deals. German weekly Welt am Sonntag first reported the dismissal of the 16 employees.<br/>
A new era of supersonic flight might be just around the corner, but there are three challenges to overcome when it comes to flying faster than the speed of sound. Those are the three Es of aviation: engineering, environment and economics. Concorde, the aeronautical marvel that made its last flight 16 years ago this week, only conquered the first of those three travel challenges. The world's slinkiest airliner could transport passengers across the Atlantic in less than half the time taken by other commercial aircraft, but it still had ecological shortcomings and high operating costs. Now at a time when carbon emissions and our planet's well-being are in the spotlight, can a return to commercial supersonic flight really be sustainable, profitable for airlines and manufacturers, and affordable for passengers? There are two US companies that certainly think so, and they're going full throttle with plans to bring supersonic airplanes to market by the mid-2020s. The journey times suggested are as short as New York to London in three hours, 15 minutes. One is targeting airlines, the other the executive jet market, and they've both got different solutions to one of the major environmental sticking points of supersonic flight: how to manage the sonic boom. "Concorde was a brilliant piece of machinery, a noble experiment, but it put too much emissions in the environment, too much noise into our communities, and was too expensive to operate. "What we're trying to do is very different," said Tom Vice, chairman, president, and CEO of Aerion Corporation. Story has more details.<br/>
Airbus's A350-1000 has been cleared for an increase in maximum accommodation to 480 seats, through the installation of modified exits. The twinjet had previously been approved for up to 440 seats. But the development of a new 'Type-A+' exit, with a dual-lane evacuation slide, has enabled the airframer to secure a higher seat count from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency. The 480-seat version would require a 10-abreast layout and modified exits on all four pairs of doors. EASA lists various zonal configurations for this version, with up to 120-124 seats in the forward cabin, 170-180 seats in the central cabin, and 180-190 seats in the aft cabin. The authority also gives options for a maximum of 460 or 470 seats if fewer Type-A+ exits are fitted. EASA states that the minimum number of cabin crew required increases to nine if the maximum seating exceeds 400, adding that a third cabin crew member must be stationed at each installed pair of Type-A+ exits. These modified exits have also been used by Airbus to raise the maximum accommodation of the A330-900 to 460 seats.<br/>