An airplane engine fan blade that broke during a United flight last month had thousands of flights remaining before it was due for a federally mandated inspection, the NTSB said on Friday. The Pratt & Whitney engine containing that blade caught fire and shed debris over homes minutes after the plane departed Denver for Honolulu on Feb. 20. The pilots turned the plane around and returned to the Denver airport. The failure, similar to an incident in Japan in December and one on another United plane in 2018, forced regulators and airlines around the world to ground more than 120 Boeing 777 planes powered by that particular engine family, the PW4000-112. The FAA ordered immediate inspections of the fan blades in those engines. United, which has more than 50 such planes, was the only American airline affected by that order. The tests, known as “thermal acoustic inspections,” are conducted by Pratt & Whitney and involve bombarding the blades with pressure, which heats them, and then looking for temperature abnormalities that could point to internal cracks. Early evidence suggests that one of the engine’s fan blades fractured during the flight last month and struck and broke another, according to the NTSB, which is investigating the failures. That first blade had flown about 3,000 flights since Pratt & Whitney last subjected it to a thermal acoustic inspection, far short of the 6,500-flight threshold at which blades are regularly inspected using the technique.<br/>
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Lufthansa is seeking to profit from the UK’s plans to exit lockdown, with its Eurowings subsidiary to offer flights from the UK to Mallorca for the first time as Germany’s coronavirus vaccine rollout sputters. Eurowings will initially fly vacationers from Birmingham and Manchester to the Spanish island and back twice a week starting at the end of May, the airline said. The flights mark the first time the carrier has flown from the UK to its base on Mallorca. Further expansion will be examined in the next few weeks, Eurowings said. Although the UK has Europe’s highest Covid death toll of more than 120,000, the country looks set to exit lockdown sooner than Germany, Lufthansa’s home country, due to a rapid rollout of vaccinations. Britain has administered around 33 vaccines per 100 people, compared with just 8 per 100 for Germany, according to Bloomberg’s vaccine tracker. “Travel sadness in Germany, holiday fever in Great Britain,” the company said Friday, adding it was reacting to “skyrocketing demand” for flights to Mallorca. Eurowings said UK tourism bookings to southern European destinations rose 600% in the week when PM Boris Johnson announced plans to end lockdown.<br/>
Ethiopian Airlines is set to take a lead role in ferrying COVID-19 vaccines around the world and expects demand for the service to last for up to three years, its head of cargo services said on Sunday. Africa’s biggest carrier has turned to cargo services to shore up revenue after the onset of the coronavirus crisis last year sent passenger numbers down sharply. “We have aircrafts converted from passengers by removing their seats, 16 of them, which are very wide aircrafts converted to transport vaccines,” said Fitsum Abadi, the managing director of Ethiopian Cargo. He was speaking after an Ethiopian plane landed with the country’s first 2.2m doses of COVID-19 vaccines acquired through the COVAX global vaccine-sharing initiative. Last December, Ethiopian Airlines reached a deal with Cainiao Network, the logistics arm of China’s Alibaba Group, to establish an international cold chain from China for the supply of pharmaceuticals, including vaccines. Under the deal, temperature-controlled pharmaceuticals are distributed twice a week from the Chinese city of Shenzhen to Africa and beyond via hubs in Dubai and Addis Ababa. Fitsum said Ethiopian, which operates a fleet of 128 Boeing, Airbus and Bombardier planes, has set up a dedicated vaccine transportation team to liaise with manufacturers.<br/>
Singapore is prioritizing safely reopening its borders this year and nailing down Changi Airport’s position as an international hub when travel recovers from the pandemic, otherwise “we will be bereft,” Transport Minister Ong Ye Kung said in Parliament on Friday. “Our mission this year is not so much to force this sharp recovery of the aviation sector, but to adapt to a new normal, to reopen safely and build up confidence, to test workable concepts and to strengthen the belief that Changi Airport will still be an international air hub post-Covid-19,” Ong said. Singapore Airlines is vital too, he said, and travel bubbles will be key in rebuilding the aviation industry and economy as worldwide vaccination rollouts lower infection rates and encourage countries to make such arrangements. “If we lose SIA or we lose Changi Airport, life in Singapore will never be quite the same,” Ong said.<br/>
An Air New Zealand crew member has tested positive for COVID-19 during routine surveillance testing. They returned to Auckland from Tokyo, Japan on February 28 on flight NZ90 and returned a negative COVID-19 result. But they returned a positive test result on Sunday after being tested on Saturday during routine testing. They have been moved to Auckland's quarantine facility. Dr Ben Johnston, Air New Zealand's chief medical officer, confirmed the positive case was among its air crew. "There are significant precautions in place for our crew operating to international destinations set out by the Ministry of Health, and we are confident that our people are following the protocols diligently," he says. "For Japan these include taking private transport to and from their hotel, isolating in the hotel while on layover and wearing PPE while travelling to and from the hotel, through the airport and on board. Aircrew are also subject to regular surveillance testing where they are tested up to once every seven days."<br/>