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Delta Wednesday reported a $652m profit in Q2 of the year, its first since the pandemic began and the latest sign that the airline recovery is well underway. The carrier reported $7.1b in revenue. There were also promising indications that the business is returning to normal, Delta said, noting that booking trends recovered as customers bought tickets further out, with average daily sales beating Delta’s internal expectations by 20%. “Domestic leisure travel is fully recovered to 2019 levels, and there are encouraging signs of improvement in business and international travel,” the airline’s CE, Ed Bastian, said. Corporate travel recovered as offices reopened throughout the quarter, with the number of business travelers down 60% in June compared with 80% in March, according to the airline. Despite those encouraging signs, Delta’s quarterly profit, which was buoyed by $1.5b in federal stimulus money, was still down 55% from the same quarter in 2019. Its revenue was down 43% from two years ago. The number of people flying for vacation or to visit friends and family within the United States has recovered to prepandemic levels, but Delta’s revenue from domestic travel was down 45% from 2019 because of the drop-off in business travel. Revenue from travel to Latin America was down only 36%, while longer flights across the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean brought in about 85% less revenue. Cargo revenue, on the other hand, was up 35%.<br/>

The head of Delta has expressed frustration with the closure of the US to European visitors, which he said had left transatlantic travel a “one-way” market despite the government being given “all the science why it’s safe”. Airline executives in the US, UK and Europe have lobbied for months for an end to restrictions on international travel. Some European countries have begun admitting US citizens who can show proof of vaccination or a negative Covid-19 test, but most UK and European visitors remain banned from the US. “The international markets where US vaccinated travellers can go, particularly in southern Europe, we’ve had really strong booking interest,” said Ed Bastian, Delta CE. “The problem is those markets are only one-way. The White House specifically is not willing to open up the US marketplace to European or UK travellers, which is a source of frustration.” He added: “We have given them all the science why it’s safe . . . but the White House is still concerned with the overall vaccination rate in the country.” The Delta variant of Covid-19 has made it difficult to predict when international travel would return at scale, Bastian said. Routes to Asia are likely to take a year to reopen, with South America off-limits for another six to 12 months and the UK and Europe until early autumn.<br/>

Delta was sued for more than $1b by one of its own pilots, who claims he developed a text-messaging app for flight crews that the airline stole and used as the basis for its own app. Captain Craig Alexander sued Atlanta-based Delta for trade-secrets theft in Georgia state court on Monday. He claims he spent $100,000 of his own money to develop his QrewLive app, which he pitched to the airline as a way to address crew communication snafus after disrupted flights. Delta turned him down but went on to launch its own identical tool, he claims. Delta “stole like a thief in the night” and defrauded its own loyal employee, Keenan Nix, a lawyer for Alexander, said Wednesday in an interview. He said Alexander, an 11-year veteran at the airline, was flying a Delta 757 “as we speak.” Morgan Durrant, a Delta spokesperson, said: “While we take the allegations specified in Mr. Alexander’s complaint seriously, they are not an accurate or fair description of Delta’s development of its internal crew messaging platform.” A five-hour power outage that resulted in hundreds of flight cancellations in August 2016 cost Delta more than $150m. The pilot said in the suit he emailed CEO Ed Bastian at the time saying “he had a ‘solution.’” Bastian allegedly responded promptly and referred Alexander to the company’s new chief information officer. Bastian and the CIO, Rahul Samant, are both named in the suit, along with four other Delta executives. Alexander claims he had several positive meetings with the airline in 2015 and 2016 in which executives made clear they were interested in acquiring his app. But Delta eventually cut off discussions and then launched its own crew app in April 2018, called Flight Family Communications.<br/>

KLM will add its first flights to Bridgetown in Barbados and Port of Spain in Trinidad & Tobago this winter in a move which will see the Dutch carrier match the number of Caribbean and South American destinations it flew before the crisis. The addition of Bridgetown and Port of Spain takes to 17 the number of destinations in the region KLM will serve, the same as it operated in the summer of 2019. Routes to the Cuban capital Havana and Fortaleza in Brazil remain temporarily suspended because of the pandemic. While restrictions remains in place – only essential travel is possible to many countries in the Caribbean and South America – KLM has been aiming to retain as wide a network as possible to position itself for when restrictions are further lifted and capacity can be increased. ”This allowed customers to make (necessary) trips and the transport of freight, such as medical supplies, could continue,” KLM says. “If further relaxations come into view, this strategy will make it easier for KLM to scale up the frequency and occupancy.”<br/>