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BA's fine for a data breach in 2018 has been sharply reduced because of new information and worries over its impact on the struggling airline in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. The UK’s data protection regulator reduced the fine to GBP20m for a breach that exposed personal and financial data of more than 400,000 customers in 2018 from the proposed GBP183m announced last year. The Information Commissioner’s Office said the fine, although its biggest to date, had been cut as it took into account the financial damage Covid-19 had caused as part of a wider regulatory position set out in April. The lower fine, provisionally set in July 2019, will come as a relief to the airline, which had vigorously contested the scale of the original penalty. “We are pleased the ICO recognises that we have made considerable improvements to the security of our systems since the attack and that we fully co-operated with its investigation,” BA said. The ICO said that the attacker potentially accessed sensitive information of BA customers, including names, addresses, payment card numbers and CVV codes. The regulator also pointed to a number of measures that the company could have taken to reduce the risk, such as rigorous testing of its cyber-defences and multi-factor authentication. The ICO added that following the attack, BA had made “considerable improvements” to its cyber security.<br/>

Sean Doyle, the newly appointed boss of BA, has held on to a sense of perspective even as his industry crumbles around him. Earlier this year, while still boss of Ireland’s Aer Lingus, he observed the sweeping disruption caused by coronavirus: “Being an airline chief executive is tough at the moment,” he said. “But I would rather be an airline CEO than an intensive care nurse or intensive care doctor.” The measured tone has come to characterise the Irishman’s management style over a two-decade career in aviation that has been spent almost entirely out of the spotlight. A low-profile executive with a reputation for an analytical brain and encyclopedic knowledge of the industry, Doyle has now been thrust into one of the most demanding jobs in corporate Britain: the national flag carrier, still stirs up a rare level of passion, scrutiny and invective. British Airways is familiar turf. The fair-haired 49-year-old had spent 20 years at the airline before joining Aer Lingus in January 2019. He returns following the removal of the company’s beleaguered CE Alex Cruz this week by IAG, its parent group, which also owns Aer Lingus, Spain’s Iberia and several other airlines. BA has been shaken by the coronavirus crisis and a turbulent four-and-a-half years under Cruz that will be remembered for a series of public relations disasters including IT failures, a significant data breach and the airline’s first pilots’ strike. Its business model was finely tuned to take advantage of the profits on long-haul and business class travel. But that has left it brutally exposed to those parts of the market now worst hit by the pandemic. Even as its rivals cut thousands of jobs to survive the crisis, BA has attracted particular criticism for the treatment of its cabin crew, and was dubbed “a national disgrace” by British politicians. Story has more.<br/>

British Airways will scale back its operations at Gatwick under a radical transformation plan to bounce back from the pandemic. Sources said that new BA CE Sean Doyle will operate fewer flights from Gatwick once the airline emerges from the crisis. BA will shift business to Heathrow, where it will counter the drop in business travel by ramping up premium leisure flights to long-haul holiday hotspots such as Bermuda and Barbados. BA has cancelled all its short-haul flights from Gatwick until March next year, leaving it with 12 long-haul routes from Britain's second-biggest airport. Shrinking the airline's Gatwick operations will form part of a wide-ranging new strategy under Doyle, who replaced Alex Cruz last week. Doyle's 22-year career at BA includes a job running the airline's business unit at Gatwick. It is understood his immediate priority is to get travel moving again by working with the rest of the industry and governments in the UK and abroad to agree travel corridors and remove quarantine restrictions. But his strategy for steering BA through the pandemic will also look at how to contend with a significant medium-term drop in revenues from lucrative trans-Atlantic and business travel. It is thought that focusing more on a 'premium leisure' business model, primarily based at Heathrow, would allow BA to attract affluent holidaymakers willing to pay extra for the convenience of flying from West London. <br/>

American Airlines Group plans to make Boeing 737 Max passenger flights at the end of this year for the first time since the aircraft’s grounding in March 2019. The Max will serve the busy Miami-New York corridor once a day starting Dec. 29 through Jan. 4, American said. The airline will “take a phased approach” to returning the Max to service once it’s approved to fly, including whether to extend the Miami-New York flight beyond Jan. 4. The carrier on Saturday removed from its schedule more than 1,900 flights that had been planned on 737 Max planes for December through March 21, 2021, and shifted them to other aircraft, the airline said. The changes were made amid uncertainty over when the Max will be certified by aviation regulators to resume commercial operation, and to allow American pilots time to bid on new Max flights. American will fly the Max, contingent on FAA approval, daily on one Miami-LaGuardia-Miami routing. The flights can be booked starting Oct. 24, and customers will be made aware that they will be flying on a Max, the airline said. “We remain in contact with the FAA and Boeing on the certification process and we’ll continue to update our plans based on when the aircraft is certified,” American said.<br/>

Malaysia Airlines’ parent company is still holding negotiations with lessors and creditors over a restructuring plan to keep the carrier alive, but the talks are taking longer than planned, according to a staff memo seen by Reuters. “The negotiations are still ongoing and taking longer than the planned timeline, but we are gaining encouraging traction from the lessors and creditors thus far,” Izham Ismail, chief executive of Malaysia Airlines and group CEO of parent Malaysia Aviation Group (MAG), said in a memo to staff on Friday. MAG said in an email Saturday it is “continuing discussions with creditors on its ongoing restructuring exercise”. MAG, owned by state fund Khazanah, said Izham’s memo to staff was to address concerns among employees. Malaysia’s national airline is seeking to restructure after the coronavirus pandemic forced it to slash operations.<br/>