Southwest does not plan to resume onboard alcohol sales until at least January, according to a memo sent to flight attendants on Friday. The timeline is tied to the extension of the federal mask mandate on airplanes and at airports. "With the mask mandate being extended to January 18, 2022, there are no current plans to bring back alcohol prior to January 2022," Randall Miller, senior manager of inflight ops, initiatives and design said in the memo. American Airlines made the same decision in August, when the mandate was extended because of the spike in COVID-19 cases from the delta variant. Southwest and American are the only two major carriers still not serving alcohol in economy class. (American serves it in first class; Southwest doesn't have a first class.) Southwest was the first major US airline to suspend traditional inflight service at the beginning of the pandemic to reduce interactions between passengers and flight attendants. In May, Southwest announced plans to start selling inflight cocktails, beer and wine again beginning in late June.<br/>
unaligned
A plane flying from the Turkish resort of Antalya to Vladivostok in Russia's far east made a safe emergency landing on Saturday in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, a source at the airport said. Azur Air flight ZF268, a Boeing 767 plane, requested an emergency landing while over Krasnoyarsk after experiencing problems with the hydraulics, Russia's' Interfax news agency reported. There were no reports of anybody being hurt. Azur Air, a former regional Russian airline which now operates charter flights, could not immediately be reached for comment. On Friday, another Azur Air flight leaving Antalya on its journey to the Russian city of Belgorod, about 580 km (360 miles) south of Moscow, initiated an emergency descent after a cabin pressure alert, air safety publication Aviation Herald reported. That plane, a Boeing 757, returned safely to Antalya and a replacement Boeing 767 flew to Belgorod after a delay, according to the report and flight tracking website Flightradar24.<br/>
Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary believes rivals Wizz Air and easyJet will need to merge or be taken out by other carriers as the airline industry consolidates following the pandemic. EasyJet revealed on Thursday it had rebuffed a takeover approach from an unnamed suitor, which a person familiar with the talks confirmed was Wizz Air. The approach is the first sign of dealmaking in a European industry that has suffered 18 months of disruption and long been seen as ripe for consolidation. “Both easyJet and Wizz will either need to be taken out or . . . coalesce together,” O’Leary said. He suggested that large flag carriers such as the British Airways owner IAG, Lufthansa or Air France could eventually try to buy rival airlines, be they low-cost rival or smaller network airlines. "Consolidation needs to happen and will happen. It’s an inevitability, particularly coming out of Covid,” he added. O’Leary believes that airlines need huge scale to survive, and that the fragmented European market is unsustainable in the long-term. Many European governments have been unwilling to lose their national airlines and — to O’Leary’s horror — unveiled sweeping aid to help their struggling carriers survive the impact of the pandemic. Following the interest in his airline, easyJet’s CE Johan Lundgren also said the pandemic could drive industry tie-ups in Europe. “I think that everybody would agree that when you go through situations like this, that there are consolidation plays happening,” he said on Thursday.<br/>
El Al has been told it must sell aircraft and a substantial portion of its frequent-flyer programme as part of the government’s conditions for receiving financial aid. The ministry of finance had indicated in August that it was prepared to offer conditional support to Israeli operators. It has detailed its requirements in a 5 September communication to El Al, offering $50 million in return for the airline’s taking the “necessary steps” to improve its cash-flow. The ministry says El Al must undertake a sale of aircraft, specifying the number and types involved and the timeframe for the transaction. El Al must commit to selling a “significant portion” of the frequent-flyer programme, and provide details, the ministry adds. The carrier also needs to reduce repayments of its financial debt in order to relieve the pressure on cash-flow over the next 12 months and will have to provide monthly updates on payments.<br/>
China’s HNA Group secured strategic investors for its airline and airport businesses, a key step in the once high-flying conglomerate’s state-run reorganization and bid to move beyond its debt woes. The administrators of HNA’s debt restructuring program have decided to bring in Liaoning Fangda Group Industrial Co. as the strategic investor for the airline business and Hainan Development Holdings Co. for the airport unit, according to exchange filings Sunday. “The fact that HNA has finally found strategic investors months into its debt restructuring process is significant progress to creditors,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Dan Wang said. The restructuring aims to help Hainan Airlines Holding and HNA Infrastructure Investment Group reduce debt and improve profitability, the two companies said in their filings. There is still a risk of bankruptcy or delisting if their financial results don’t meet regulatory requirements, they said, without elaborating. Uncertainty about the companies’ recovery still remain as the latest statements didn’t disclose how much the assets were sold for. The valuation of the assets would be key to the restructuring, he said. The HNA Group has approved at least 406b yuan ($63b) in debt claims while facing 1.2t yuan of claims in total, people familiar with the matter said in June after the company’s first meeting with creditors.<br/>
Pilot error and a failure to follow safety guidelines probably caused the Air India Express crash that killed 21 people last year, the country’s worst aviation accident in a decade, investigators said in a report on Saturday. The Boeing 737, repatriating Indians stranded in Dubai due to the coronavirus pandemic, overshot the table-top runway and crashed here while landing at Calicut International Airport in the southern state of Kerala in heavy rain on Aug. 8, 2020. “The probable cause of the accident was the non-adherence to standard operating procedures by the pilot flying,” says the report by the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, a division of the Ministry of Civil Aviation that probes plane accidents. The pilot “continued an unstabilised approach and landed beyond the touchdown zone, halfway down the runway”, instead of doing a “go around”, the agency says in the 257-page report, published after a year-long investigation. In spite of being asked to go around by the pilot monitoring the landing, the pilot flying the aircraft failed to do so, the agency said, and the monitoring pilot also failed to take over the controls and execute the order. The aircraft had already made one failed attempt to land before it overran the 2,700-metre (8,900-foot) runway. The crash at the airport in Kozhikode was India’s worst passenger aircraft accident since 2010.<br/>
Kenya's first low-cost airline, Jambojet, started a flight service to the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo city of Goma on Friday, it said, looking to tap into a projected jump in demand for air travel in Africa. The carrier, which was launched in 2014 and is owned by national airline Kenya Airways (KQNA.NR), expects Africa to become one of the fastest growing regions for aviation in the world in the next two decades, with an average annual expansion of nearly 5%. "We want to be part of the growth," said Vincent Rague, Jambojet's chairman. Other Kenyan firms, including its biggest banks Equity and KCB Group, are also expanding into the Democratic Republic of Congo, a relatively untapped market. Jambojet will fly into Goma, the capital of North Kivu province, twice a week from its Nairobi hub, before increasing to four times a week with time.<br/>