American Airlines on Thursday reported a $169m profit for Q3thanks to more than $990m in federal payroll support. Revenue for the quarter totaled $8.97b down about 25% from the same period of 2019 but up from the $3.17b American brought in a year ago. That was ahead of analysts’ expectations of sales of $8.94b. Without one-time items, like government payroll support, American had a loss of 99 cents per share, less than the $1.04 per-share loss analysts expected. “While we don’t like reporting losses, this was our smallest quarterly loss since the pandemic began,” American’s CEO, Doug Parker, and the carrier’s president, Robert Isom, wrote in a note to employees. For Q4, American expects its revenue to fall by about 20% from 2019, when it generated $11.3b. It also said its capacity will be down 11% to 13% compared with two years ago. The airline forecast pretax margins, excluding special items, in Q4 to be between negative 16% and negative 18%.<br/>
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Qantas is gearing up for a Christmas rush, bringing back all its Australian workers and adding flights as the nation’s borders reopen after more than 18 months of near-isolation. The airline will start its first commercial flights between Australia and India in almost a decade before Christmas, and flights to Singapore, Bangkok, Fiji, Phuket and Johannesburg will resume ahead of schedule, it said in a statement Friday. About 11,000 staff who have been stood down during the pandemic will return by early December. The carrier will also bring back two of its mothballed giant A380s three months earlier than planned, and is in discussions with Boeing about accelerating the delivery of three new 787 Dreamliners which have been in storage for most of the pandemic. The changes come after Australia’s biggest state, New South Wales, said that from Nov. 1 returning fully-vaccinated citizens would no longer need to spend two weeks in hotel quarantine, effectively ending a border ban that has kept the nation largely isolated from the rest of the world since the pandemic started. “This is the best news we’ve had in almost two years and it will make a massive difference to thousands of our people who finally get to fly again,” Qantas CEO Alan Joyce said. A quarantine-free travel bubble between Australian and Singapore is also set to open soon, leaders of both countries said. “We anticipate that being able to be achieved within the next week or so,” Australian PM Scott Morrison said Friday. <br/>
A quarantine-free travel bubble between Australia and Singapore could be established within the next week after PM Scott Morrison confirmed the two countries were in the final stages of concluding an agreement. Australians may also be able to fly to Bangkok, Phuket, Johannesburg and Fiji before Christmas after Qantas and Jetstar announced they were restarting international flights out of Sydney ahead of schedule. The Singapore arrangement will be similar to the travel bubble Australia established with the South Island of New Zealand this week. The talks are focused on allowing vaccinated students and business travellers to travel freely between Australia and Singapore as the first step, before opening up to tourists. The travel bubble would be dependent on whether states relax their quarantine arrangements, but NSW and Victoria have already scrapped mandatory hotel quarantine for all vaccinated international arrivals from November 1. Morrison said on Friday morning the government was in the “final stages of concluding an arrangement with the Singapore government”. “We anticipate that being able to be achieved within the next week or so, as we would open up to more visa class holders coming out of Singapore, we will see that occur.” He said the arrangement would be open to states and territories that were open “in the same way as they are here in Sydney” and that it aligned with the timetable Qantas has announced for its flights to and from Singapore.<br/>