Virgin Atlantic has agreed a GBP1.2b rescue package aimed at securing the grounded airline for the next five years after months of negotiating with shareholders and private investors to stave off collapse. CE Shai Weiss said shortly after the deal was signed off on Tuesday that the rescue plan was a “major achievement” that most people “probably thought . . . impossible”. “We’re planning for forever,” said Weiss. “This is not a plan for another plan . . . our job has been to take a very severe look into 2021 specifically. We funded the plan for the worst case rather than best case as you would expect us to do.” The rescue package will inject about GBP1.2b into the airline over the next 18 months, with GBP200m of cash from Richard Branson’s Virgin Group and GBP170m of debt funding from US hedge fund Davidson Kempner Capital Management. It will include GBP400m of fee deferrals from shareholders, Virgin Group and Delta, which owns 49%, while creditors have agreed to postpone payments worth a further GBP450m. The carrier has also implemented a cost-saving programme that will involve 3,550 job cuts and secured agreement from its credit card companies to unlock customer cash. Weiss hoped the package would help the carrier return to profitability in 2022. “We must and will become a sustainably profitable enterprise,” he said. He admitted there were “challenges ahead”. But added: “We haven’t done this on a prayer and a hope. I think people can get comfortable with the fact that this has been reviewed by so many people. There was competition to lend us money.”<br/>
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EasyJet Chairman John Barton said he expects shareholders to approve the British carrier’s GBP419m share sale, providing a financial buffer as it contends with a slow recovery from the coronavirus shutdown. The airline received proxy votes worth 60% of share capital in favor of the conditional part of a 703 pence-a-share equity raise announced last month, Barton told investors on Tuesday. EasyJet needed a simple majority to push ahead with the proposal. Final results will be announced later on. After the equity increase, EasyJet has said it will have more than GBP3b of cash, including funds raised from sale-and-leaseback transactions on its aircraft. Liquidity has been boosted by a slightly lower-than-expected cash burn as more customers opt to take vouchers for canceled flights instead of asking for refunds. The carrier was among the first European airlines to start increasing flights as lockdowns eased, in the hope of salvaging the tail end of the summer season. EasyJet plans to operate 50% of its usual routes in July and 75% in August, though lower frequencies mean capacity will be down about 30% in the third quarter of the year.<br/>
The fatal crash of a cargo plane last year was caused in part by the failure of the US federal government to establish a reliable system of weeding out unqualified airline pilots, investigators concluded. The FAA came under heavy criticism Tuesday as the NTSB issued its findings in the fatal crash of a cargo jet carrying Amazon.com Inc. packages near Houston. The lack of an improved system for tracking pilot records -- despite a decade-long congressional mandate -- has created “holes in the safety net,” NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt said at a video hearing. “The FAA has dragged their feet on implementing a sufficiently robust pilot-records database.” The copilot of an Atlas Air cargo plane who inadvertently added full power during a routine approach to land in Houston became disoriented and pushed the Boeing Co. 767-300 into a steep dive, NTSB found. He had repeatedly panicked during training exercises and shown other deficiencies and those systemic issued hadn’t been addressed, NTSB found. His failures while training with at least two prior airlines weren’t known to Atlas, a division of Atlas Air Worldwide Holdings, because he hadn’t disclosed that and there was no FAA system for checking. He died in the crash.<br/>
Ukraine’s foreign minister said Tuesday it was soon to blame human error for the shooting down of a Ukrainian passenger airliner near Tehran in January, challenging the findings of Iran’s Civil Aviation Organisation (CAO). The CAO said in an interim report that the plane was accidentally downed, killing 176 people on board, because of a misalignment of a radar system and lack of communication between the air defence operator and his commanders. But Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told an online briefing that many questions remained unanswered. “I want to clearly emphasise: it is early to say that the plane was shot down as a result of human error, as the Iranian side claims,” he said. “We have many questions, and we need a large number of authoritative, unbiased, objective answers about what happened.” Iran’s Revolutionary Guards shot down the Ukraine International Airlines flight with a ground-to-air missile on Jan. 8 shortly after the plane took off from Tehran. Iran later called it a “disastrous mistake” by forces who were on high alert during a confrontation with the United States.<br/>
Emirates Airlines, which has carried relatively large numbers of returnees from Pakistan and India back to Hong Kong during the coronavirus pandemic, has halted all flights to and from the city until Saturday amid new rules requiring passengers from high-risk areas to test negative for Covid-19 before flying. Passengers who had been in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, South Africa, the Philippines or Indonesia would need to provide a negative Covid-19 test result before arriving in Hong Kong, the government said on Monday. Secretary for Food and Health Sophia Chan Siu-chee on Tuesday refused to rule out adding more countries to the so-called high-risk list. Travellers would be asked to show test certificates from Saturday although the rule takes effect from Wednesday, an airline industry source said. With few airlines flying from India and Pakistan to transit hubs and more broadly to Hong Kong, the number of flight options has narrowed considerably for those in the South Asian countries.<br/>