SAA cut flights to nine international cities and all domestic services except Johannesburg to Cape Town as the embattled state-owned carrier scales back to stay in business. The airline will stop flying to destinations including Hong Kong, Munich and Sao Paulo at the end of the month, it said. African cities such as the Angolan capital, Luanda, and Abidjan in Ivory Coast are also affected, while the vast majority of local flights will be left to low-cost unit Mango. “SAA does not intend to make any further significant network changes,” it said. “Passengers and travel agents can therefore feel confident about booking future travel.” Administrators took control of SAA in December and have been drawing up a survival plan. The unprofitable airline is accelerating a move to cut jobs alongside the reduction in routes, according to one major labor group. The sale of some assets is also under consideration. International services that will be retained are those between Johannesburg and Frankfurt, London, New York, Perth and Washington D.C.<br/>
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Boeing and American safety officials refused to cooperate on Thursday with a new inquiry by Dutch lawmakers into a deadly crash near Amsterdam in 2009 that had striking parallels with two more recent accidents involving the manufacturer’s 737 Max. Members of the Dutch parliament wanted to question the Boeing CE, David Calhoun, about the company’s possible influence over the original Dutch investigation of the accident, which killed nine people on a Turkish Airlines flight. The NTSB also refused lawmakers’ request to participate. The legislators initiated the review in the wake of a NYT examination of evidence from the 2009 crash that found that Dutch safety authorities had either removed or played down some criticisms of Boeing in their accident report, after pushback from an American team that included the manufacturer and officials from the NTSB and the FAA. The Dutch authorities had also declined to publish an expert study that blasted Boeing for “design shortcomings” and other missteps. The investigating agency, the Dutch Safety Board, had said the study was confidential, but later posted it online. Boeing and the NTSB declined to comment Thursday. <br/>
Avianca has cancelled or converted much of its Airbus A321neo order, switching some to the smaller A320neo variant. The change, listed in Airbus’s latest backlog revision, follows a previous cancellation of 62 A320neos by Avianca’s parent company Synergy Aerospace. Synergy wiped out its A320neo orders in December 2019 along with agreements for 10 A350-900s and a single A330 freighter. Avianca had disclosed last month that it was axing 20 single-aisle Airbus jets from its backlog. Analysis of Airbus’s latest figures shows that the cuts have focused on the A321neo fleet, with Avianca’s commitment for 28 aircraft being cut to just two. It indicates that 21 of the aircraft have been switched to A320neos, with the remaining five cancelled.<br/>
Lufthansa appears to have trimmed its Airbus A350-900 order, cutting two aircraft from its commitment. Lufthansa ordered 25 A350-900s in 2013 and supplemented this agreement last year with a deal for another 20. But Airbus’s latest backlog revision, covering January 2020, indicates the carrier has reduced its order total from 45 to 43. It had taken delivery of 15 of the Rolls-Royce Trent XWB-powered aircraft by the end of January. Airbus has newly recorded deals for 10 A350-900s from Air France and a single -900 for Air Lease.<br/>