Lattitude Hub has reinforced its connections between Tenerife Sur and both Madrid Barajas and Bilbao for the winter season, with a slight alteration - it will now operate under its initial brand Canarian Airways. After it suspended its flights with just a few days in operation in late July, it resumed them once again, as ch-aviation previously anticipated, on November 11. Its single aircraft, A319-100 EC-NMO, chartered in from One Airways, is currently operating Madrid-Tenerife 3x weekly and Bilbao-Tenerife 1x weekly, according to the ch-aviation capacities module. With the name change, the company said that it sought to “strengthen its commitment to the destination and position itself in the market with a more recognisable name that directly links the company to its origins.” Jorge Marichal, the company’s president, explained: “We began to operate under the name of the parent company, but Canarian Airways is what we are, our original idea, and with which we want to show Canarian society that we are part of it and are committed to its economic and social development - without forgetting that in our main source markets it is easily recognisable, as it is linked to a leading world destination.”<br/>
unaligned
Latvia-based Air Baltic made it through its home country’s recent four-week lockdown without adjusting its capacity – or its plans for an IPO in the coming years. Speaking to FlightGlobal at the Dubai air show on 15 November – the day Latvia’s lockdown ended – the carrier’s CE Martin Gauss said load factors fell by around 10 percentage points to 50% during the period, but that the business benefited from having positioned itself to deal with the ups and downs of Covid-19. Therefore, instead of reacting with shock to the challenges created by the lockdown announcement in October, Air Baltic was instead ready to calmly ask itself “what do we do?” to make it through the four weeks, according to Gauss. Helpfully, the lockdown did not come with a ban on outbound travel. “We did an advertising campaign to take people and fly them away from that local pandemic, and it worked very well,” Gauss states. “We were surprised how well we were able to stimulate outbound traffic when of course the inbound traffic was heavily reducing.”<br/>
UK regional airline Flybe, one of the first corporate casualties of the coronavirus pandemic, has outlined plans to return to the skies next year. The carrier said it would restart flying to destinations in the UK and EU in “early 2022” from a new base in Birmingham. The original Flybe was in poor financial shape leading up to the pandemic, and collapsed in March 2020 after loan talks with the government fell through following a sudden fall in passenger numbers. Flybe was then bought from administrators EY in October 2020 by a company run by investor Lucien Farrell’s hedge fund Cyrus Capital, with the intention of reviving the brand. Cyrus had originally injected money into Flybe as part of a rescue spearheaded by Virgin Atlantic in 2019. The new owners have not revealed flying routes, but industry experts have warned that rivals have already taken over many of the company’s viable old routes, such as Manchester to Southampton. The airline also lost valuable take-off and landing slots at Heathrow airport during the administration process. “As for what’s next, please stay tuned. We plan to provide more information in the coming weeks and months,” said CE Dave Pflieger, an industry veteran and turnround expert. Before it collapsed, Flybe was Europe’s largest regional carriers, serving important regional air routes in Britain and carrying 8m passengers a year between 81 airports in the UK and Europe. Tim Alderslade, the CE of Airlines UK, the industry association, told MPs at a parliamentary transport committee hearing on Tuesday that the airline will need to work hard to find its niche in a difficult market.<br/>
Indian ultra low-cost airline Akasa Air said on Wednesday it signed an agreement with CFM International for its LEAP-1B engines in a deal valued at nearly $4.5 billion at list price to power the 737 MAX airplanes it recently bought. The agreement comes after billionaire investor Rakesh Jhunjhunwala-backed Akasa Air placed an order for 72 Boeing 737 MAX jets on Tuesday, valued at nearly $9b at list prices. Jhunjhunwala, known as “India’s Warren Buffett”, has teamed up with former chief executives of IndiGo, the country’s biggest carrier, and Jet Airways to tap into demand for domestic air travel, which is nearing pre-pandemic levels as the country recovers from a devastating outbreak earlier this year. The agreement also includes spare engines and long-term services, the companies said in a joint statement.<br/>