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Southwest flights within the US were temporarily suspended on Tuesday afternoon, the second major disruption to the company’s operations in less than 24 hours. The FAA said that the airline had requested the nationwide grounding as it “resolved a reservation computer issue.” In a separate statement, Southwest said it had canceled nearly 500 flights and, it blamed the disruption on “intermittent performance issues with our network connectivity.” “Teams are working quickly to minimize flight disruptions and customer impact,” the airline said. “We appreciate our customers’ patience as we work to get them to their destinations.” The airline experienced a similar outage late Monday, which it had blamed on a third-party provider of weather data. Both disruptions prompted widespread complaints on social media from frustrated travelers. A spokesman, Dan Landson, said the company was “investigating the root cause of each event.” The airline does not believe the disruptions on Monday and Tuesday were related, and there was no indication that they were the result of a breach or a hack, he added.<br/>

JetBlue Airways bucked convention when it began unveiling dozens of new routes early on in the coronavirus pandemic. The additions were widely seen as a play to fly where the few travelers out there were going but also some strategic moves, like expanding in competitors’ hubs, like Dallas/Fort Worth and Detroit. A year on, the widely accepted view that strategic flying is a euphemism for losing money is ringing true for the New York-based carrier. JetBlue has cut 23 of the 90 new routes it unveiled between July and December 2020, an Airline Weekly analysis of Cirium schedule data shows. Newark was a winner, keeping the majority of its respective additions, while Philadelphia and Raleigh-Durham saw the brunt of the cuts with nine of their combined 13 new routes gone. Los Angeles also retained many of its pandemic routes though many replaced service from nearby Long Beach when JetBlue left the airport in October. JetBlue spokesperson Philip Stewart said the latest changes come as bookings return to “expected patterns” and schedules are shifting to “support our long-term network strategy.” He added that many of the pandemic routes helped the airline “generate cash for operations during a very difficult time.” “A lot of this stuff wasn’t going to stick around,” Ailevon Pacific Aviation Managing Director Brad DiFiore said when asked of the cuts. “It was a completely different environment when they added it.”<br/>

Emirates posted an annual loss of $5.5b in its last financial year as the “tremendous toll” of the coronavirus pandemic forced the airline to slash its workforce and turn to its Dubai government shareholder for support. The carrier, which had made a $288m profit in the previous financial year, said annual revenue fell 66% to $8.4b to the end of March as capacity declined by 58%. The group was hit hard by travel restrictions, which included the United Arab Emirates’ suspension of passenger services for almost two months from March 2020. The airline carried 6.6m passengers in 2020-21, down 88% compared with the previous financial year. Emirates gradually restored its passenger network from the middle of June last year to more than 120 destinations by the end of March. Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum, Emirates’ chair and chief executive, said the carrier hoped to restore full operating capacity “as quickly as possible”. He said the “fundamental ingredients” of Emirates’ success remain unchanged and the airline would work with the government to deliver a return of activity to an economy focused on trade and tourism. “No one knows when the pandemic will be over but we know recovery will be patchy,” he said. “Economies and companies that entered pandemic times in a strong position will be better placed to bounce back.”<br/>

Ireland’s transport ministry hopes to finalise by early July an emergency process to seek a carrier to reinstate the Public Service Obligation (PSO) routes operated until its recent collapse by Stobart Air. It says it will “in the coming days” issue a request for quotes directly to airlines with a view to restoring the services as soon as possible. The temporary contract will run for a maximum of seven months, before a new tender for a long-term contract is initiated. Stobart Air operated the PSO domestic flights from Dublin to Donegal and Kerry, but ceased operations on 12 June after its planned acquisition collapsed. The rapid process comes as the ministry says it ”recognises the importance of restoring regional connectivity to these airports” ahead of the country’s reopening to international travel amid the Covid crisis on 19 July. ”In tandem, the department will launch a procurement process for a maximum of four years for the continued provision of the services, which will apply after the temporary contract has expired,” it says. ”This will mitigate against any disruption to these services once the emergency contract expires.”<br/>

Ryanair does not support a ban on Belarusian airspace in the long term, its chief executive said on Tuesday and called on international authorities to secure assurances from the country that there would be no repeat of last month’s forced landing. Belarus scrambled a warplane to force a Ryanair flight to land in Minsk on May 23. The plane was carrying an opposition journalist who was then arrested, prompting punitive measures against Belarus in response. Belarusian carriers are now banned from flying over European Union and UK territory, while EU and British authorities issued a safety directive saying their aircraft should avoid Belarusian air space unless in an emergency. Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary told a British parliamentary committee that while he supported those measures, the aviation industry depended in the long term on unrestricted access to all airspace and that this must be restored. “We need to have an outcome where the European and the UK authorities, hopefully assisted by international partners, receive appropriate assurances from the Belarusian, and or Russian authorities, that this will never happen again,” he said. Short-term sanctions were necessary to deter other states from copycat behaviour, he added, but in the long term the politicisation of airspace was not the answer as it would hurt the aviation industry and international connectivity. “The freedom to overfly states is something that we have perhaps taken for granted for the last 70-80 years,” O’Leary told the lawmakers. “We must restore it as quickly as possible.”<br/>

Swiss carrier Helvetic Airways is to open a base at Basel airport, where it will station a pair of regional Embraer E-Jets for Mediterranean services. Helvetic says the Basel operation, which commences on 10 July, is its first from the airport. It will fly to the Spanish city of Jerez, as well as the Cypriot resort of Larnaca, and the Greek island of Santorini. The airline signals that its decision is tied to the gradual easing of travel restrictions within the European Union, spurring a “tangible increase in demand” for holiday flights. Basel offers “a lot of potential”, says Helvetic chief executive Tobias Pogorevc. The airline will use 112-seat Embraer 190s and 134-seat 195-E2s on the route. Helvetic’s decision follows wet-lease specialist SmartLynx’s opting to open its own base at Basel for holiday flights earlier in June. SmartLynx is operating charters for leisure firm TUI and has stationed an Airbus A320 at the airport. It is flying to destinations in the Mediterranean as well as the Canary Islands, according to Basel airport’s operator. SmartLynx is also flying for TUI from Germany’s Saarbrucken airport, and will operate A320s for travel service Involatus from several other German airports, among them Munich, Hamburg and Cologne.<br/>

Official indecision about travel pass apps will complicate the reopening of air traffic in Southeast Asia, according to a senior AirAsia executive. Javed Malik, group COO at AirAsia, says he has spoken to over a dozen companies offering travel pass technology in the past year, but the apps have largely failed to obtain government buy-in. “You’ve got all these players, but none of them have any one government saying we’re going to use them other than the IATA Travel Pass in aviation,” he says. “But then you’ve got hospitality, you’ve got conference events, you’ve got sports arenas, what do they use?” Malik made the remarks during a panel discussion during the GHI Digital Reconnect Asia virtual conference. The focus of the panel was the restart of air travel in Southeast Asia and in the broader Asia-Pacific amid the coronavirus pandemic. An array of travel restrictions means that the Asia-Pacific - and Southeast Asia in particular - have lagged the global recovery in air travel. Complicating things further for Southeast Asian carriers is their high reliance on international travel. Malik adds that while governments in the region are working to vaccinate people and get travel moving again, no guidance has been offered on the travel pass applications that will be used. “We need to have a policy that allows us to have the technology ready to do digital passports,” he says. “And yet there are no companies chosen - or even indicated - as being the preferred two or three. So I’ll probably end up integrating with about five to seven companies in order to cover our Asian network, to be sure that we can actually accept every guest that wants to fly with us.”<br/>