European leaders are expected to say on Thursday that all non-essential travel needs to remain restricted as the Covid health situation remains “serious” across the continent. The EU’s 27 heads of state will gather virtually on Thursday afternoon to discuss the current state of the pandemic in the region. The EU is still one of the worst hit parts of the world by the coronavirus, with a number of nations still in lockdown or with strict social restrictions in place. At the same time, vaccination efforts have faced a bumpy start and some question whether the EU will reach its target of vaccinating 70% of its adult population by the summer. “The epidemiological situation remains serious, and the new variants pose additional challenges. We must therefore uphold tight restrictions while stepping up efforts to accelerate the provision of vaccines,” European leaders are expected to say, according to a draft document. The ongoing health emergency is particularly acute in the Czech Republic and parts of Latvia, Sweden, Spain and Portugal. European Council President Charles Michel, who chairs the summits, said: “The new variants have become the dominant strains in many member states. This implies enhancing our sequencing capacity, and preparing the groundwork for vaccine updates.” Given the health crisis, European leaders are not yet inclined to ease travel restrictions.<br/>
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Boeing has agreed to pay $6.6m in penalties to US regulators after failing to comply with a 2015 agreement to improve its safety processes. The FAA on Thursday announced the penalties in a press release. The company agreed to pay $5.4m to settle earlier cases brought against the company and another $1.21m for two more recent cases, the agency said. “Boeing failed to meet all of its obligations under the settlement agreement, and the FAA is holding Boeing accountable by imposing additional penalties,” FAA Administrator Steve Dickson said. “I have reiterated to Boeing’s leadership time and again that the company must prioritize safety and regulatory compliance, and that the FAA will always put safety first in all its decisions.” The agreement comes only months after Boeing’s best-selling plane, the 737 Max, was ungrounded after a 20-month span that prompted lawmakers and others to denounce the company’s safety culture and led to billions of dollars in lost sales and other costs. During that time, the FAA withheld what had been routine authority for the company to perform such things as approvals of planes coming off the assembly line. Story has more details.<br/>
As regulators around the world order urgent inspections of certain Boeing 777 engines after one failed dramatically over suburban Denver last Saturday, they must also wrestle with a decades-old quandary: The complex technology necessary to find cracks buried within metal parts can produce notoriously inconsistent results. Not only are the tests prone to vague readings, but the results are only as good as the training and attention span of the human examiner. Indeed, after a 2018 failure of an engine fan blade identical to the one involved in the Denver episode, investigators found inspections had twice missed a crack that began years earlier. “It probably was there and they just didn’t find it,” James Wildey, a retired NTSB metallurgical expert, said of the internal imperfections that led to the most recent failure. “The indications are the crack should have or could have been detected.” <br/>
Australia’s aviation regulator said on Friday it would lift a near two-year ban on flights to and from the country that use the Boeing Co 737 MAX aircraft, making it the first nation in the Asia-Pacific region to do so. “We...are confident that the aircraft are safe,” said Graeme Crawford, the acting chief of the Civil Aviation Safety Authority. The regulator has accepted the comprehensive return-to-service requirements set by the US FAA as state of design for the 737 MAX, he added. No Australian airlines operate the 737 MAX, but Fiji Airways and Singapore Airlines operated them on flights with Australia before the craft were grounded in March 2019 after two deadly crashes.<br/>
President Joe Biden's pick to be the top US trade negotiator said Thursday she will seek to find a solution to the costly, longstanding fight over subsidies for Boeing and Airbus. The 16-year-old trans-Atlantic conflict over government aid to the competing aircraft manufacturers has seen Brussels and Washington each impose punitive tariffs, including US duties on a record US$7.5b in European goods authorized by the WTO in 2019. "I would very much be interested in figuring out, pardon the pun, how to land this particular plane because it has been going on for a very long time," Katherine Tai told senators during her confirmation hearing to serve as US Trade Representative. Tai acknowledged the "disruption and the pain" the tariffs cause, but said that is how the WTO process is designed to work. Each side has won WTO rulings in the aviation dispute that authorized punitive tariffs.<br/>
Europe’s airline industry has been warned that in the absence of concrete and speedy technological progress towards a reduction in CO2 emissions, people might choose to fly less as the impacts of climate change become more apparent. The executive director of the European Climate Foundation, Pete Harrison, said that the framework proposed in the report might be too slow to deliver genuine progress on zero-emissions technologies. A danger exists, therefore, that demand reduction becomes “the real business as usual” for the airline sector, Harrison says. At the same event, however, EasyJet CE Johan Lundgren expressed his belief that the Destination 2050 report outlines an achievable framework in a reasonable timeframe, enabling commercial aviation to deliver its economic and social benefits while having a smaller impact on the environment. In Lundgren’s view, the question of “whether we should fly less” is irrelevant in that context, even though he acknowledges that EasyJet customers recently cited improvements in sustainability as their number-one post-pandemic concern when it comes to air travel. But for Harrison, while the Destination 2050 report shows aviation is talking “more realistically” about what needs to be done in terms of sustainability, he believes “it doesn’t go far enough”.<br/>
Colombia’s Juan Carlos Salazar has been named as the new Secretary General of the ICAO. Salazar will assume the new role at the UN agency on 1 August, succeeding China’s Fang Liu, who has served for two terms since 2015. “Mr Salazar was appointed based on his extensive professional experience in the administration of complex organizations at the national, regional and international levels,” says ICAO. “He is also an expert in aviation law and standards with more than 26 years of experience in international negotiations in the fields of aviation, management, and public policy.” Salazar has served as the Director General of Civil Aviation in Colombia since 2018. In this role he has overseen over 3,100 employees and 72 airports.<br/>