A California woman is accusing Southwest of racial profiling, saying she was accused of human trafficking while traveling with her biracial daughter. Mary MacCarthy of Los Angeles said she and her 10-year-old daughter, Moira, were flying to Denver on October 22 after receiving news that MacCarthy's brother had suddenly died. MacCarthy said they had a brief stop in San Jose and boarded another Southwest flight but realized then that they couldn't be seated together. "I asked flight attendants if we could be seated together but they told us we'd each have to take a middle seat," MacCarthy said. "So with their permission I asked other passengers if they would kindly move so we could be together, especially as my daughter was grieving, and they did. People are nice." When they arrived in Denver, MacCarthy said, she and her daughter were met on the jetway by two Denver police officers. "I got quite a shock; having lost my brother the night before, I thought that someone else in my family had died and that police had been sent to deliver the news!" MacCarthy wrote in an email to Southwest's media team, which was included in the police report. Story has more.<br/>
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The Spanish police were searching on Saturday for a dozen passengers on a flight from Morocco to Turkey who fled into the Spanish island of Mallorca after their plane made an emergency landing at the airport there. The plane, a Friday-evening Air Arabia Maroc flight from Casablanca to Istanbul, asked to divert to Palma de Mallorca to treat a person on board who had reported falling sick, according to Spanish air traffic authorities, and landed at around 8 p.m. The passenger was taken to a hospital but soon discharged and detained on suspicion that he had faked illness in order to allow himself and others to enter Spain illegally, according to the police. While he was being hospitalized, the police statement said, other passengers fled the plane across the tarmac and managed to cross the airport’s perimeter fences. The chaos kept the airport, a major tourism hub, closed for more than three hours, and forced several other planes to divert. It also brought a new aspect to Spain’s repeated struggles with illegal crossings, both by land from Morocco to the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla and from West Africa by sea, a route that has frequently had deadly consequences. The police did not identify the man who was hospitalized, but said in a statement that he had apparently suffered a diabetic coma on the flight. He was reported by Spanish media to be Moroccan. A fellow passenger who accompanied him to the hospital also fled. The plane eventually resumed its flight to Istanbul, with all its remaining passengers. Palma’s airport reopened shortly before midnight. Aena, Spain’s national airport operator, said that 13 planes had to be rerouted to Barcelona and other airports. More than 40 other flights suffered significant delays or cancellations.<br/>
Vueling CE Marco Sansavini believes the carrier’s moves to exploit new international opportunities that have emerged in the European short-haul market since the pandemic will provide long-term returns. The Spanish carrier hit breakeven in Q3 as the airline was able to increase capacity as travel restrictions within Europe began to ease. While the results marked the first time it has not lost money since the crisis hit, and outstripped those of its IAG peers Aer Lingus and British Airways, it did not match the profits recently disclosed by the low-cost units of Air France-KLM and Lufthansa. Short-haul low-cost operators have been the chief beneficiaries of the initial lifting of travel restrictions in Europe and Eurowings and Transavia posted profits of E108m ($125m) and E105m respectively for Q3. “We could have decided to just focus on domestic, and certainty that would have led to a stronger results,” Sansavini said during a third quarter IAG results briefing today, noting these were the first markets where restrictions were lifted. Nevertheless we saw opportunities for the 22 new routes we opened in the international market that were related to the fact that competitors were leaving us space in the market. That is an investment, and clearly there are restrictions that we have been through during the summer in international markets, in the UK and Italy in particular. So when you compare operators, you need to consider the weight of these two different businesses, domestic and international. For Vueling, 65% of our Q3 capacity was international... It’s an investment that we make because we believe we have the right cost structure to pursue that in the long-run.”<br/>
Jeju Air, South Korea's biggest budget carrier, said Friday it will resume flights to Guam later this month amid the country's accelerating vaccination campaign. Jeju Air plans to operate 38 flights on the Incheon-Guam route from Nov. 25 to Jan. 31 before it begins regular flights, depending on the country's vaccination and infection rates, the company said. The low-cost airline suspended most international routes in March last year following the outbreak of COVID-19 here in January in 2019. Jeju Air resumed regular flights to Saipan in July in a preemptive measure to absorb post-coronavirus travel demand. Charter flights to Chiang Mai, Thailand, are also available from Friday, but the flights could be temporary, depending on demand from travel agencies, a company spokeswoman said. International flights to five cities ― Tokyo, Osaka, Weihai, Harbin and Manila ― are available for business travel and Koreans residing in the cities. Jeju Air plans to expand other international routes to meet growing demand for outbound trips and an increase in vaccinated people in South Korea, adding it expects to resume flights to Bangkok, as well as other major cities in Thailand, by the end of the year.<br/>
Vietnamese budget airline Vietjet Aviation said it had signed an agreement with Airbus on Friday involving the timing of deliveries of 119 planes on order with the European manufacturer. The airline has 119 A321neo narrowbody planes, used for domestic and regional international flights, on order that have yet to be delivered, according to Airbus' order book. It did not provide details of the new delivery dates in a statement issued on Friday. Southeast Asian budget carriers that had ordered hundreds of planes before the pandemic have been hit hard by travel restrictions that left fleets largely grounded for months, though the situation is beginning to improve. Vietnam and Malaysia last month allowed domestic flights to resume. Vietjet's move comes a month after Malaysian budget airline AirAsia Group also restructured its Airbus orders and revised delivery plans. Airbus CCO Christian Scherer said that the agreement with Vietjet was another example of how the planemaker had worked with customers to find solutions to adapt to the impact of the pandemic.<br/>