Southwest on Wednesday introduced new incentives to get staff vaccinated against Covid-19, following similar policies that other carriers rolled out earlier this year. The Dallas-based carrier said it will offer extra pay to staff who show proof of full vaccination by mid-November, according to a company memo, which was reviewed by CNBC. Employees who upload their vaccination cards to the company by the end of Nov. 15 will get 16 hours of pay, though flight attendants and pilots will receive pay for 13 trip segments, the company said. Southwest told staff that its new policies are “unrelated” to the sweeping measures President Joe Biden announced last week to increase Covid-19 vaccinations. However, Southwest last week said it was “prepared to move toward compliance” with the forthcoming rules. Biden has asked the Department of Labor to make Covid inoculations mandatory for companies with more than 100 employees. “If you have not been vaccinated and choose to do so, this timeline gives you enough time to receive both rounds of a two-series vaccine or the single-dose vaccine,” Southwest wrote to staff. Southwest will also restrict quarantine pay protections for Covid infections to staff who have been vaccinated, effective Nov. 16. Those unvaccinated employees can still use their own sick time, however.<br/>
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WestJet Airlines has named Harry Taylor its interim president and CE. Taylor has been WestJet’s CFO since 2015. He will assume the interim CEO role between late November and mid-December 2021. Taylor will replace current WestJet CE Ed Sims, who announced in June his plans to retire at the end of this year. Sims has been CEO since May of 2017. Jennifer Bue, WestJet’s current vice-president of finance planning and analysis, has been named interim CFO. WestJet says Taylor played a key role in helping steer the airline through the COVID-19 pandemic. He was responsible for managing WestJet’s liquidity at a time when little to no revenue was coming in. Taylor also led WestJet’s first US bond issue and negotiated the purchase of the airline’s new Boeing 787 Dreamliner and Boeing MAX aircraft.<br/>
Ryanair has entered an exclusive agreement with Airline Flight Academy, under which the company will become the budget airline’s cadet training partner in Ireland and operate a newly-inaugurated Dublin facility. Airline Flight Academy, which already offers recruitment and training support to Ryanair, has been selected to run the new centre near Dublin airport, formally opened by Irish deputy prime minister Leo Varadkar on 14 September. Ryanair has invested E50m in the centre which features three full-flight simulators – one for the Boeing 737 Max and two for Airbus A320s – plus one fixed-base simulator for each type. It also has a cabin crew training area with facilities for emergency evacuation and cabin fire training, plus classrooms and pilot briefing rooms. “Access to these new facilities will enable Ryanair to recruit and train over 5,000 new pilots, cabin crew, engineers and ground operations professionals over the next five years,” says the budget carrier.<br/>
An Iranian Mahan Air plane landed in the Afghan capital Kabul on Wednesday with Iranian diplomats on board, arriving from the city of Mashhad, Iran's Al-Alam TV said. Regular passenger services to Kabul stopped after the Islamist Taliban movement captured the Afghan capital last month. "Mahan Air had requested an extraordinary flight from Mashhad to Kabul, which was granted and the flight took place,"Iranian Civil Aviation Organization spokesman Mohammad Hassan Zibakhsh was quoted by state broadcaster IRIB as saying. "No permits have been issued for scheduled flights between Iran and Afghanistan yet."<br/>
Chinese airline passenger traffic took a hit in August — amid a resurgence in the coronavirus in large swathes of the Chinese mainland — with aviation regulators calling it “not optimistic”. Figures released by the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) state that Chinese carriers carried 22.4m passengers in August, which was nearly 52% lower year on year. Compared to the same month in pre-pandemic 2019, the figure represented a significant 63% decline. The authority did not provide a breakdown on domestic and international passenger numbers, though it is understood that a large majority are domestic travellers. CAAC officials, in a routine press conference held on 14 September, pointed out that the latest wave of infections — caused by the more-infectious Delta variant — had caused traffic to “significantly decline”. The Delta-fuelled infections in China originated from the eastern city of Nanjing in late-July and quickly spread to other parts of the country, including to capital Beijing. Since then, strict social gathering restrictions have been imposed in Nanjing, which also shut its airport for weeks, as well as other Chinese cities. <br/>
Malaysia’s long-haul budget carrier AirAsia X Bhd (AAX) has obtained court permission to extend the deadline to convene its creditor meetings to March next year, it said on Wednesday. AirAsia X said the High Court granted an order for an extension until March 17 for it to convene separate meetings of the creditors “for the purpose of considering and, if thought fit, approving with or without modification” a restructuring scheme to be proposed. In February, it was granted court approval to convene the separate meetings here with different groups of creditors to vote on its proposal within 180 days. The court had separated the airline’s 14 creditors into three classifications — the first for airport operator Malaysia Airports Holdings Bhd, the second for other creditors, and the third for Airbus. AAX, an affiliate of AirAsia Group, proposed last October to restructure 64.15b ringgit of debt and has faced objections to its scheme from some creditors. The airline said the alternative was liquidation with no returns to creditors. AAX will need approval from creditors at the meetings holding at least 75% of the money owed.<br/>
A small cargo plane with three crew members on board crashed into a mountain in Indonesia's jungle-clad Papua region on Wednesday, police said. The Rimbun Air flight lost contact with air control authorities shortly before it was due to land at an airport in Papua's Intan Jaya regency, police and transport officials said. "The weather at the airport was not supportive, it was predicted that the plane would land but the runway was not clearly visible," Papua police spokesman Ahmad Mustofa Kamal said, adding a search operation for the three-man crew was underway. The wreckage of the Twin Otter 300 aircraft was found by locals over three hours later near a village in the highlands, Papua police said. Images released by the rescue team on Wednesday showed the debris strewn on the jungle floor.<br/>