general

US regulators had been weighing stricter engine inspections prior to last week's fiery engine failure on a United Airlines plane over Denver, the FAA said Tuesday. The FAA reviewed inspection records and maintenance history after a Japan Airlines fan blade incident on December 4, 2020 "to determine the cause of the fracture and was evaluating whether to adjust blade inspections," an FAA spokesman said Tuesday. The Japan flight landed without injury. On Saturday, a United Airlines Boeing 777 plane quickly returned to Denver after liftoff due to engine failure. No one was injured in the Denver incident. Both the Denver flight and the Japan Airlines plane involved seasoned Boeing 777 planes with the same kind of Pratt & Whitney engine. That kind of engine was also used in a February 2018 United flight that also suffered engine failure before being safely landed.<br/>

In the wake of a weekend scare on a Boeing 777 over engine failure, the FAA moved immediately to suspend flights on planes with the same model. On Tuesday, the FAA disclosed that it had also been contemplating stricter rules on the same kind of planes even before the Denver flight, following a similar incident on Japanese Airlines in December when a Pratt & Whitney engine also failed. The statement comes as the US agency, once considered the gold standard of aviation safety, works to recover its standing in the wake of the previous Boeing 737 MAX disasters. A September 2020 congressional probe over the two MAX crashes that killed 346 people slammed the agency, saying the crashes were "the horrific culmination of a series of faulty technical assumptions by Boeing's engineers, a lack of transparency on the part of Boeing's management, and grossly insufficient oversight by the FAA." FAA chief Steve Dickson reiterated the agency's commitment to safety, saying he looked forward to a NTSB investigation, but that the agency was being proactive. "We're not waiting for that," Dickson said of the NTSB. "We're acting with the best data we have. "We want to understand what happened and to take steps to prevent this from happening again in the future," Dickson said.<br/>

Two years ago, after a second fatal 737 MAX crash in five months, Boeing worked behind the scenes to urge aviation regulators not to ground the jet. Its efforts went as far as the White House, with Boeing’s then-Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg calling former US President Donald Trump to assure him the jet was safe. But Saturday’s engine failure on a United Airlines 777, which produced jarring footage of an engine on fire and chunks of metal littering a Denver suburb - but no injuries - triggered a very different response inside Boeing. Within a day, Boeing issued a statement urging airlines to suspend use of 777 jets with the same Pratt & Whitney PW4000 engines - effectively grounding 128 jets as investigations played out. The world’s largest aerospace company also expressed unequivocal support of the US FAA’s call for extra inspections and Japan’s mandatory suspension of flights. “If there is anything Boeing has learned from the MAX situation, it’s to take action immediately,” one industry source familiar with Boeing’s thinking said. “Even if that action might result in some loss or embarrassment - do it quickly.”<br/>

Aviation regulator, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), has added New Zealand to a growing list of countries where certain Boeing 777s have been banned from operating. The move follows the shocking recent engine failure of a United Boeing 777 equipped with a Pratt and Whitney 4000 series engine, while flying over Denver on February 20. Dean Winter, CAA's deputy CE said they'll be making all airlines and pilots aware that 777s with the 4000 series Pratt and Whitney engines are not authorised to fly within New Zealand airspace. "We are issuing a 'notice to airmen,' (known as a NOTAM) today which effectively prevents this aircraft type from landing or taking off within New Zealand domestic airspace or transiting through it," Winter said. A NOTAM is an official communication issued by an aviation authority to alert pilots and airline dispatchers of potential dangers in a flight route, or to changes in permitted flight routes. "We are taking this action out of an abundance of caution to prevent any potential threat to people or property, should another engine experience a similar fan blade failure like the incident in Denver," he said. "We have quickly joined the aviation regulators in the United Kingdom and Japan in taking this action. We also note Boeing has recommended the suspension of all 777 with the affected engines until the cause of this failure is known. <br/>

The IATA says it expects its digital Covid Travel Pass will be ready "within weeks". The pass is an app that verifies a passenger has had the Covid-19 tests or vaccines required to enter a country. It also verifies they were administered by an approved authority. The industry body sees the pass as essential for reopening air travel, as many countries still have strict restrictions or quarantines in place. "The key issue is one of confidence. Passengers need to be confident that the testing they've taken is accurate and will allow them to enter the country." said Vinoop Goel, IATA’s regional director of airports and external relations. "And then governments need to have the confidence that the tests that the passengers claim to have is one which is accurate and meets their own conditions."<br/>

US FAA chief Steve Dickson warned on Tuesday of a changed industry in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic that has shaken air travel over the past year and created new safety risks that must be addressed. “The industry that existed last March in many respects no longer exists today,” Dickson said at a town hall about commercial aviation safety shown on social media, citing the retirement of veteran pilots, new fleets with complex aircraft and less international flying. “All these changes are creating a whole new set of stressors that can inject new safety risks into the system,” he said. While the risk of a fatal US commercial aviation accident has fallen by 94% since 1997 thanks to improvements in aviation safety, Dickson said the industry must proactively curb new safety risks by understanding the pandemic’s impact. He cited added training and enhanced industry oversight as possible measures. “COVID-19 has created a tremendous amount of disruption and change in our system with breathtaking speed,” he said.<br/>

Quarantines continue to frustrate travelers and strangle airlines a year into the pandemic, with the threat from highly infectious coronavirus variants meaning enforced isolations are mostly getting longer and stricter rather than easing up. Even as vaccines embolden countries like Israel and the UK to plot paths to reopening, authorities around the world are tightening the screws to stop Covid-19 mutations slipping through quarantine models designed to contain a less aggressive virus. With questions hanging over the efficacy of vaccines on mutated strains, this new front in the public-health battle is damping hopes of a swift rebound in international air travel. While UK PM Boris Johnson said Monday that foreign travel could start as soon as May 17, triggering a surge in flight bookings, England has only just put in place its toughest border curbs of the pandemic, imposing 10-day hotel quarantines for British and Irish nationals and residents arriving from dozens of countries. Meanwhile, in parts of the world that have been most successful in keeping out the virus, quarantine rules are being tightened and policy makers are striking a more cautious tone on when travel may start again. Authorities in Melbourne are sketching out plans for custom-built isolation facilities outside the city. Hong Kong has one of the most extreme policies: a soul-crushing 21-day hotel lockup awaits residents arriving from outside China. The different requirements are neutering a push by airlines for a standardized global response to get people flying again. The IATA’s proposal for test or vaccine certificates to replace quarantines hasn’t gained traction with governments. Story has more.<br/>

Working conditions and the stress of the pandemic's effects on the travel industry are wreaking havoc on lives of flight attendants a year into the pandemic. For people in the airline industry having to try to deal with all this on their own, and particularly for flight attendants, a lack of good information from the US government has led to the isolation of people, genuine desperation as well as real disconnection from families and friends, said Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA). AFA represents almost 50,000 flight attendants at 17 airlines. “We’re seeing a dramatic increase on mental health issues and that ranges from a lot of issues people are concerned about. Their health or their family’s health or actually dealing with very difficult things … having lost someone or having someone in the hospital,” Nelson said. “And then you layer on top of that the real insecurity about whether or not we’re even going to have a job.” To date, internal tracking by AFA shows that over 3,500 flight attendants have tested positive over the course of the pandemic and approximately 18 have died across the industry, an AFA spokesperson said. “And what has been very difficult is that in the beginning, you could track flight attendants getting exposed to Covid at work. And also, it was very clear when a flight attendant had passed,” Nelson said. “A year later, community spread makes it virtually impossible to tell whether or not someone has contracted this at work.”<br/>

Incheon Airport will roll out speedy coronavirus tests from next month, cutting down the process from seven hours to two or four hours. The new loop-mediated isothermal amplification -- or LAMP-type -- rapid PCR tests, which have been approved by the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety, can take as little as two hours to show the result and have been recommended for passengers with no symptoms traveling abroad, the Incheon International Airport said Tuesday. Negative results from rapid PCR tests are accepted by many countries excluding a select few, such as China and Thailand as of Monday, the public corporation said. From next month, the airport’s testing center will also oversee regular PCR tests themselves from March 1 with the help of Inha University Hospital, which has been helping with building the infrastructure, rolling out equipment and training staff. Under the new move, regular PCR testing will take four hours as opposed to the conventional seven hours, the IIAC said. The IIAC also plans to introduce a smart quarantine app for passengers at Incheon Airport as well as kiosks to print out negative coronavirus results as part of their efforts to improve convenience at the airport. “We plan to preemptively build smart quarantine platform infrastructure at Incheon Airport such as introducing thermal screening kiosks as well as quarantine and disinfection robots to become the airport that puts safety before anything else during the post-coronavirus era,” said Kim Kyung-wook, the newly appointed president of the state-run IIAC.<br/>

Mexico’s Federal Audit Office (ASF) retracted a report that found President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s decision to cancel a partly built airport in Mexico City had cost 332b pesos ($16b), hours after the president denounced its findings. The ASF said Monday it had ordered a review into its report after finding “inconsistencies”. Its figure for the cost of cancelling the airport had been too high, due to a flaw in methodology, it said. Lopez Obrador has defended his 2018 decision to cancel the airport, his predecessor’s flagship project. In 2019, the transport ministry estimated the cost of the cancellation at 100m pesos. At a news conference on Monday, Lopez Obrador criticized the ASF, calling its figures an exaggeration and demanding the auditor explain how it arrived at them. The ASF said it would publish a final revised report once its review was complete.<br/>