Airlines are coming under increasing scrutiny for continuing to fly in Iran after a missile barrage and warnings by US safety regulators about the dangerous conditions. American, British and Canadian officials said Thursday it is “highly likely” that Iran shot down a Ukrainian airliner near Tehran this week, possibly by accident, during a time of high political tension in the region. About 2 1/2 hours before the Ukraine International Airlines jet with 176 people on board took off, the FAA issued emergency orders prohibiting American pilots and airlines from flying over Iran, the Persian Gulf or the Gulf of Oman. The notices warned that heightened military activity and political tension in the Middle East posed “an inadvertent risk” to US aircraft “due to the potential for miscalculation or mis-identification." Foreign airlines aren’t bound by FAA directives, but they often follow them. In this case, however, several large international carriers — including Lufthansa, Turkish Airlines, Qatar Airways and Aeroflot — continued to fly in and out of Tehran after Iran fired missiles at military bases inside Iraq that house US troops. They still were flying after the FAA warning, and after the Ukrainian jetliner crashed, according to data from Flightradar24, which tracks flights around the world. “It was awfully peculiar and awfully risky,” said Peter Goelz, a former managing director of the US NTSB. “That’s a theater of war and these guys were acting like there was nothing going on.” Goelz said airlines should have canceled all flights when Iran fired the missiles. Those attacks occurred the night before the Ukrainian plane was scheduled to leave Tehran.<br/>
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Boeing employees mocked federal rules, talked about deceiving regulators and joked about potential flaws in the 737 Max as it was being developed, according to over a hundred pages of internal messages delivered Thursday to congressional investigators. “I still haven’t been forgiven by God for the covering up I did last year,” one of the employees said in messages from 2018, apparently in reference to interactions with the FAA. The most damaging messages included conversations among Boeing pilots and other employees about software issues and other problems with flight simulators for the Max, a plane later involved in two accidents, in late 2018 and early 2019, that killed 346 people and threw the company into chaos. The employees appear to discuss instances in which the company concealed such problems from the FAA during the regulator’s certification of the simulators, which were used in the development of the Max, as well as in training for pilots who had not previously flown a 737. “Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn’t,” one employee said to a colleague in another exchange from 2018, before the first crash. “No,” the colleague responded. In another set of messages, employees questioned the design of the Max and even denigrated their own colleagues. “This airplane is designed by clowns, who are in turn supervised by monkeys,” an employee wrote in an exchange from 2017. The release of the communications — both emails and instant messages — is the latest embarrassing episode for Boeing in a crisis that has cost the company billions of dollars and wreaked havoc on the aviation industry across the globe. <br/>
Development of China’s C919 single-aisle plane, already at least five years behind schedule, is going slower than expected, a dozen people familiar with the program told Reuters, as the state-owned Commercial Aircraft Corporation (COMAC) struggles with a range of technical issues that have severely restricted test flights. Delays are common in complex aerospace programs, but the especially slow progress is a potential embarrassment for China, which has invested heavily in its first serious attempt to break the hold of Boeing and Airbus on the global jet market. The most recent problem came down to a mathematical error, according to four people with knowledge of the matter. COMAC engineers miscalculated the forces that would be placed on the plane’s twin engines in flight - known in the industry as loads - and sent inaccurate data to the engine manufacturer, CFM International, four people familiar with the matter told Reuters. As a result, the engine and its housing may both have to be reinforced, the people said, most likely at COMAC’s expense – though another source denied any modification. That and other technical and structural glitches meant that by early December, after more than two and a half years of flight testing, COMAC had completed less than a fifth of the 4,200 hours in the air that it needs for final approval by the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), two people close to the project said.<br/>
Airbus will increase production of A320-family jets at its Mobile, Alabama, plant to seven a month by the beginning of 2021, adding 275 jobs, the planemaker said Thursday. Airbus currently produces close to six single-aisle jets a month at the plant and expects to reach that level in the next few weeks. The increase comes as Airbus faces US tariffs on aircraft assembled in Europe in a dispute over aircraft subsidies. Aircraft assembled at its US plant and delivered to U.S. airlines are currently exempt from the 10% duties. Airbus has previously said it envisages total capacity of eight aircraft a month in Mobile, where it began assembling aircraft from sections shipped from Europe in 2015. Airbus reiterated on Thursday it aims to increase overall A320-family production to 63 a month in 2021.<br/>
Angkasa Pura II (AP II) will invest Rp303b ($21.9m) to expand Indonesia’s Jambi Sultan Thaha airport and the works will begin next year. This will increase the airport’s handling capacity from 1.6m to 2.6m passengers annually, says AP II’s president director Muhammad Awaluddin. The runway will also be extended from 2,220m to 2,600m, and the apron expanded to accommodate up to 13 aircraft. AP II says the expansion is necessary as the airport handled 1.8 million passengers in 2018, above the 1.6 capacity it was designed for. Discussions are also underway with the Jambi city government for the airport to handle international flights. “We support plans for Sultan Thaha [airport] to be an international airport. From Jambi, there are potential international services [that can be operated] such as those to Singapore, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, China, as well as to other countries,” says Awaluddin.<br/>