Ukraine will press Iran to hand over the black boxes from the crash of a Ukraine International Airlines plane at a meeting with a visiting Iranian delegation Monday, foreign minister Vadym Prystaiko said. Returning the black boxes would show that Iran wanted an unbiased investigation of the crash, Prystaiko said. Iran had said Sunday it was trying to analyse the black boxes from the airliner its military shot down this month, denying an earlier report it would hand them to Ukraine. " At first they stated that they were handing them over, then the same person stated that they were not handing them over. This created some misunderstanding in Ukraine and we were starting to be asked: are they being handed over or not?" <br/>
unaligned
Ryanair is suing flight-price comparison website Skyscanner for allegedly selling the airline’s flights through its own domain and through links to online travel agents. It is also seeking an injunction requiring Skyscanner, Skyscanner Holdings and Skyscanner 2018, to end the selling-on through the use of “screenscraping” whereby the information on the Ryanair website is used for comparing the prices of similar flights. The dispute arose after Ryanair discovered last November that Skyscanner had been permitting website users to use a “green flights filter”, to only show results for flights with lower CO2 emissions. Ryanair became concerned it was being ranked and/or filtered in an inaccurate and/or unfair manner. <br/>
The govt has bought Air Zimbabwe 2 Boeing 777-200ER aircraft from Malaysia with the first landing in Harare Monday and being handed over to the airline and the second expected in the next few weeks. The Boeing 282-seater 777-200ER is ideal for inter-continental flights and is expected to contribute significantly towards the growth of the national airline and spur business opportunities for the country especially in the tourism sector. Acting president Constantino Chiwenga said the arrival of the plane demonstrated govt’s commitment to capacitating Air Zimbabwe. “Receipt of this Boeing 777 aircraft is clear testimony that we are taking concrete steps to capacitate our national airline so that it plays a role in promoting economic growth, creating jobs and facilitating international trade and tourism,” he said. <br/>
Kazakhstan’s civil aviation committee has revealed a damning list of flaws in Bek Air’s flight operations and maintenance processes, to justify the carrier’s grounding. One of Bek Air’s Fokker 100s crashed on take-off from Almaty Dec 27, resulting in the enforced suspension of the airline’s operation – a measure which the airline had argued was illegal. But the committee states that Bek Air has not only suffered 2 major incidents in the past 3 years, but experienced a “significantly higher than acceptable” level of serious safety problems over this period. It adds that a detailed probe of the carrier was initiated after its suspension, during which “a number of violations” was uncovered. <br/>