general

At least four planes chartered to evacuate several hundred people seeking to escape the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan have been unable to leave the country for days, officials said Sunday, with conflicting accounts emerging about why the flights weren’t able to take off as pressure ramps up on the United States to help those left behind to flee. An Afghan official at the airport in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif said that the would-be passengers were Afghans, many of whom did not have passports or visas, and thus were unable to leave the country. He said they had left the airport while the situation was sorted out. The top Republican on the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, however, said that the group included Americans and they were sitting on the planes, but the Taliban were not letting them take off, effectively “holding them hostage.” He did not say where that information came from. It was not immediately possible to reconcile the accounts. The final days of America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan were marked by a harrowing airlift at Kabul’s airport to evacuate tens of thousands of people — Americans and their allies — who feared what the future would hold, given the Taliban’s history of repression, particularly of women. When the last troops pulled out on Aug. 30, though, many were left behind.<br/>

Ariana Afghan Airlines resumed some flights in Afghanistan between Kabul and three major provincial cities on Saturday, the carrier said, after a technical team from Qatar reopened the capital's airport for aid and domestic services. Flights between Kabul and the western city of Herat, Mazar-i Sharif in northern Afghanistan and Kandahar in the south have started, the airline said in a statement on its Facebook page. "Ariana Afghan Airlines is proud to resume its domestic flights," it said. Earlier, Qatar's ambassador to Afghanistan said a technical team was able to reopen Kabul airport to receive aid, according to Qatar's Al Jazeera news channel. The airport's runway has been repaired in cooperation with authorities in Afghanistan, the ambassador said, according to Al Jazeera, in a further small step towards a return to relative normality after the turmoil of the past three weeks. Reopening the airport, a vital lifeline with both the outside world and across Afghanistan's mountainous territory has been a high priority for the Taliban as they seek to restore order after their lightning seizure of Kabul on Aug. 15.<br/>

Qatar has flown humanitarian aid into Kabul and said it will operate daily aid flights to Afghanistan over the next few days, providing much-needed supplies following a hiatus in much Western aid due to Taliban's takeover last month. Qatar has emerged as a key interlocutor between western nations and the Taliban, after developing close ties with the militant group through hosting its political office since 2013. A Qatari aid flight carrying medical supplies and food products arrived in Kabul on Saturday and Qatar Ambassador to Afghanistan Saeed bin Mubarak Al Khayareen was at the airport for its arrival, the Gulf State's foreign ministry said. Qatar has helped reopen the airport, which closed for several days after the United States-led airlift of its citizens, Afghans and other nationals ended last month. <br/>

Bill Wernecke at Delta was driving his daughter to college when the call came telling him the US military wanted to use commercial airlines to fly Afghan refugees to American soil. Father and daughter barely spoke over the hundreds of miles from the Kentucky-Tennessee border to northern Indiana. The managing director for Delta’s charter business was on the phone for almost six hours, preparing to staff and deploy three twin-aisle jets to move thousands of people across the globe. Last month the US Department of Defense activated the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, or CRAF, which allows the government to commandeer commercial aircraft and crew, for only the third time since it was established in 1951. Airlines enrol in the programme, which pays them to ferry soldiers and other passengers during national emergencies, in exchange for the chance to bid on the government’s peacetime business. The US military evacuated or facilitated the evacuation of about 124,000 people out of Kabul before withdrawing American troops by August 31 after two decades of war. They were flown to “lily pads” — military bases in Qatar, Bahrain, Germany and Italy to await commercial carriers to fly them to the US. So far, about 25,000 people have arrived in the US, most of them touching down at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, with Philadelphia recently receiving evacuees too. Airlines are shuttling about 4,500 people a day from the overseas bases, with another 2,500 a day flown from their ports of arrival to military bases in Texas, Wisconsin and New Mexico. The programme is likely to remain in force until mid-September. The government routinely charters planes from commercial carriers although it rarely invokes the second world war-era provision. But the Pentagon’s need for planes came as the airline industry continues to recover from the financial and operational devastation wrought by the pandemic. Defence officials used CRAF on this occasion, Wernecke said, because “they didn’t get enough volunteers”. Story has more.<br/>

This summer, unruly passenger behavior seems to have reached new heights. In one incident, a passenger punched a Southwest flight attendant and knocked out two of their teeth. Video also circulated of a passenger getting taped to their seat after they reportedly punched and groped Frontier Airlines flight crew. The FAA said it has issued more than $1m in fines to unruly airline passengers so far in 2021. US flight attendants say the stress of the situation is taking its toll,<br/>Susannah Carr, who works for a major US airline, says unruly incidents used to be "the exception, not the rule." Now they're "frequent." "I come in expecting to get push back. I come in expecting to have a passenger that could potentially get violent," she says. Allie Malis, a flight attendant for American Airlines, says air crew are "exhausted -- physically and emotionally." "We've gone through worrying about our health and safety, worrying about our jobs -- now [we are] worrying about our safety in a different way."<br/>

Israel will allow small foreign tour groups from selective countries to visit from Sept. 19 under a pilot programme to kick-start tourism, the government said on Sunday. Tour groups of between 5 and 30 people from countries on Israel's green, yellow and orange lists will be allowed to enter the country provided all group members have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, the tourism ministry said. Individual tourists, who have not been allowed to visit Israel since the outset of the coronavirus pandemic there in March 2020 unless they are visiting family members, will still not be allowed to enter outside of a tour group. In May, amid a drop in COVID-19 infections, Israel had allowed in small tour groups. More than 2,000 visitors arrived, mainly from the United States and Europe, raising hopes of recovery within a tourism industry battered by the pandemic. But the initiative was paused in August as the Delta variant spread, leading to a surge in COVID-19 infections in Israel, despite a world-leading vaccination rollout.<br/>

Singapore has lifted the operational ban on Boeing 737 Max operations, becoming the second country in Southeast Asia to do so, days after neighbouring Malaysia. A statement from the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore (CAAS) says restrictions on 737 Max operations into and out of the city-state have been lifted effective 6 September. The lifting of the grounding comes after the agency “reviewed the operational data” of the aircraft after it resumed service in other parts of the world, including in the USA and European Union. CAAS says it “observed that there have been no notable safety issues” with the aircraft since its return to service. Singapore grounded the popular narrowbody on 12 March 2019, days after the second of two fatal crashes involving the 737 Max. “CAAS made the decision to lift the restrictions after completing its technical assessment, which included an evaluation of the design changes to the aircraft made by Boeing and approved by the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and other validating authorities,” the agency states. <br/>

Malaysia will reopen the popular tourist island of Langkawi to domestic tourists under a “travel bubble” scheme, as part of a broader shift towards living with an endemic coronavirus. Announcing the move, Malaysian prime minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob says the island will reopen on 16 September, with other destinations in the country opening up once vaccination rates hit the benchmark 80%. Ismail adds that the reopening of Langkawi will “revitalise” the local tourism sector, which has been in the doldrums for more than a year since the pandemic begun. It will also kickstart domestic travel once again, after the country was placed on strict lockdown for months this year, following record coronavirus infections. The decision — reportedly mirroring neighbouring Thailand’s tourism reopening plans — was understandably welcomed by Malaysian carriers. Low-cost giant AirAsia says the “highly-anticipated” move “will pave the way for more domestic and international travel resumption in the near future as the situation continues to improve and more people get vaccinated”. AirAsia Malaysia chief Riad Asmat says: “The government’s decision to commence this travel bubble bodes well for the recovery of the whole tourism industry in Langkawi, and we look forward to working closely with the government, Langkawi Development Authority, as well as Tourism Malaysia, to support the revival of the tourism sector.” <br/>

Boeing's delivery of 787 Dreamliners will likely remain halted until at least late October as the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has rejected the company's recent proposal to inspect them, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday. The FAA confirmed on July 12 that some undelivered Boeing 787s have a new manufacturing quality issue the company needs to fix before shipment. Airlines pay most of the purchase price upon delivery. Boeing met with FAA on Aug. 2 to persuade the agency to approve an inspection method that would speed deliveries with targeted checks rather than nose-to-tail teardowns, the newspaper said. The regulators flagged internal company disagreements over the aircraft sample size, and repeated that Boeing's employee group that acts as an in-house regulator needs to concur with the company's proposals, the report added. An FAA spokesman said the agency continues to engage with Boeing and will not sign off on the inspections "until our safety experts are satisfied." Boeing's 737 MAX and 787 have been afflicted by electrical defects and other issues since late last year, and it only resumed deliveries of the 787 in March after a five-month hiatus. A Boeing spokesperson said the company was committed to providing full transparency with regulators and working with the FAA through the rigorous process to resume 787 deliveries.<br/>

When this century began, you could pull up to the airport 20 minutes before a domestic flight in the United States and stroll straight over to your gate. Perhaps your partner would come through security to wave you goodbye. You might not have a photo ID in your carry-on, but you could have blades and liquids. Back in 2001, Sean O'Keefe, now a professor at Syracuse University and former chair of aerospace and defense company Airbus, was deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget in the George W. Bush administration. "At the White House, I was a member of the National Council Security team," he said. He and his colleagues had been briefed on the al Qaeda terrorist group and understood the threat it posed, "but at the same time our imaginations simply did not give us the capacity to think that something like [9/11] could happen." It had been nearly 30 years since Palestinian terrorist attacks at Rome airport in 1973, which killed 34 people and demonstrated that air travel was vulnerable to international terrorism. "That seemed to have changed the whole security structure in Europe and in the Middle East in a way that didn't really penetrate the American psyche," O'Keefe said. "It's this typical American mindset; we have to experience it to believe it." Then on the morning of September 11, 2001, a team of 19 hijackers was able to board four different domestic flights in the northeastern US in a series of coordinated terror attacks that would claim 3,000 lives. Flying in America, and the rest of the world, would never be the same again. Story has more.<br/>