Roughly 2,000 United food service workers are worried they might be laid off before the end of the year, despite the airline receiving billions in Covid relief funds and agreeing to pay millions in bonuses to its top executives. An estimated 900 United catering workers and their supporters staged protests against the airline on Wednesday. The demonstrations outside airports in Denver, Houston, Honolulu and Newark, New Jersey, came nearly three months after United's vice president of customer strategy and innovation, Mandeep Grewal, sent a letter to the catering staff informing them that the airline was "exploring the option of having a third-party come in and run our current in-house kitchen operations." The letter, which has been provided to CNN Business by the union UNITED HERE, said United would likely be evaluating potential vendors for "several months" until the third quarter of 2021. "I know this may cause concern for those who have roles within our kitchens and menu design teams and I want to assure you that the wellness of our employees and the impact to our customers will all be taken into consideration," Grewal wrote. "We will consider a variety of providers, including those that we work with today," she added.<br/>
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One of Lufthansa’s Airbus A350-900s is undergoing an extensive conversion programme, being fitted with equipment to enable the twinjet to operate as the carrier’s latest climate research platform. The aircraft was delivered to the carrier three years ago, in May 2018. Lufthansa says it will be transformed into a “flying research laboratory” by modification specialist venture Lufthansa Technik Malta. The aircraft will collect data on long-haul routes from the end of 2021 for the European IAGOS-CARIBIC programme, which uses civil aircraft to investigate and analyse the air with a complex 1.6t set of instruments fitted inside a container. Lufthansa has been involved in atmospheric and climate measurement work since the mid-1990s, having used a similarly-modified Airbus A340-600, an A330-300, and an A340-300.<br/>
Two planes came alarmingly close to each other when flight crew misheard an air traffic control instruction during a landing in windy weather. The crew of a Singapore Airlines jet was preparing to land at Sydney Airport on 9 February following a missed approach due to windshear. While on the go-around, air traffic control advised the pilots of the Airbus A380 jet to turn right, according to an investigation by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB). However, the pilots misheard the instruction and instead turned left. This put them in the flight path of another plane, a Bombardier Dash 8 aircraft, which was descending to land around 11km away. The crew of the Superjumbo was then instructed to turn right and climb immediately; while the crew of the Dash 8 aircraft were instructed to make a right turn to maintain an acceptable distance between the planes. However, this then resulted in the Dash 8 plane flying close to another passenger plane, a Boeing 737, which was also getting ready to land at Sydney airport. Story has more.<br/>