United on Thursday afternoon resumed operations at Newark Liberty International airport in New Jersey after disruptions caused by flooding from the remnants of Hurricane Ida. The impact of the storm was still being felt in the northeastern United States as Amtrak and other rail services were canceled. United, the largest carrier at the New York area airport, had canceled more than 200 flights nationwide, according to Flightaware, an aviation website. American Airlines has also experienced delays and cancellations at the Newark airport, while Delta said it has seen roughly 80 cancellations across New York City area airports. Flooding killed at least 21 people, swept away cars and submerged New York City subway lines after torrential rains.<br/>
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Ethiopian Airlines Group plans to resume flights with the Boeing 737 Max jet by early next year after reaching an out-of-court settlement with the US planemaker over a deadly crash in March 2019. CEO Tewolde GebreMariam is now convinced “beyond reasonable doubt” the model is safe after various modifications. He had previously said Africa’s biggest carrier would be the last to return to the Max after it was cleared to fly again by regulators. Many other airlines already have the model back in service. “I can confirm that we are committed to the Boeing 737 Max,” the CEO said Thursday. “My estimate is by the end of the calendar year or beginning of next year, January, we will be flying the airplane.” The deal Ethiopian has reached with Boeing over the crash that killed 157 people is confidential, but the airline considers the matter finalized. “We have settled our case with Boeing, that’s why we are now starting the process to fly back the airplane,” Tewolde said. “This happened in the last three months. We are happy on the settlement.”<br/>
China’s aviation regulator is likely to keep the current tight caps on international flights throughout the first half of 2022, analysts cited Air China as saying this week. The move has broad implications for tourism in the Asia-Pacific region, where Chinese outbound travellers normally play an outsized role, though other countries have also been slow to open borders because of relatively low vaccination rates and rising COVID-19 cases. The Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) last month said that weekly international flights were at only 2% of 2019 levels, as more flights were suspended amid a rising number of imported COVID-19 cases. China’s three biggest airlines, Air China, China Southern Airlines and China Eastern Airlines, said in their earnings calls that CAAC’s restrictions on international flights may continue until the first half of 2022, given the government’s COVID-19 prevention approach around the Beijing Winter Olympics in February, Parash Jain, head of shipping, ports and Asian transport research at HSBC, said in a note on Wednesday. This would push a full recovery further out to 2024, Jain added.<br/>
Japan is investigating an Amazon Web Services outage that caused disruptions at major online brokerages, a leading mobile phone carrier and the country's biggest airline, a government spokesperson said Thursday. The outage, at least the third for Amazon since June, hit ANA Holdings, which said some flights were delayed after problems with its ticketing and check-in system, although services were later restored. An Amazon spokesperson said that the six hour disruption in the Tokyo region was caused by the "loss of several core networking devices" and had "been resolved". Amazon declined to comment on how many customers were affected by the glitch, but monitoring website Downdetector showed no other outages, suggesting it was confined to Japan. In June, many users experienced a brief outage at Amazon's platforms including Alexa and Prime Video, and weeks later Amazon said its online stores had faced a global outage. read more"The Financial Services Agency will look into it to understand what happened and is asking affected companies to prioritise the needs of their customers," Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato told a regular media briefing.<br/>