Travelers who "wanna get away" will have a new option on Southwest next year. In a presentation to investors Wednesday, the airline announced that it will introduce a "new fare product" midway through 2022. The fares will appear in a fourth column alongside Southwest's current Wanna Get Away, Anytime and Business Select offerings. Details are still under wraps, but Southwest Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer Andrew Watterson said it will be above the airline's lowest priced Wanna Get Away category and offer enhanced attributes "customers will happily pay a little bit more" for. He stressed that the new product will not take anything away from other fares but offer something more. It will be available across all channels for business or leisure. Southwest also announced a new co-brand loyalty agreement with Chase, which is expected to contribute to the airlines' profitability. Details were not revealed on that either. No new destinations were announced for next year. Watterson said Southwest was probably done with new airports for a while. Instead, the airline plans to focus on maturing the 18 new markets it has added since 2020 as well as its Hawaii service. <br/>
unaligned
This summer, as Polish guards repelled migrants trying to cross their country’s eastern border with Belarus, one man who slipped furtively into Poland received a warm but top-secret welcome. Unlike the desperate people from Iraq and elsewhere seeking a better life in Europe, the man was offering a dramatic intelligence coup — inside information on the forced landing just a few weeks earlier in Minsk, the Belarusian capital, of a Ryanair flight from Athens to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. The plane’s passengers included a prominent opponent of President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, the dissident journalist Roman Protasevich, who was arrested along with his Russian girlfriend, Sofia Sapega, when the plane landed in Minsk. European security officials who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss confidential information said that the man welcomed by the Poles had worked as an air traffic controller at Minsk’s airport. Since his defection, he has provided detailed evidence that the Ryanair flight was targeted for a fake bomb threat as part of an operation to grab Mr. Protasevich orchestrated by Belarus’s intelligence service, the officials said. Asked about the defection, Stanislaw Zaryn, director of Poland’s Department of National Security, declined to comment on specifics but said that Polish officials investigating what he described as the Ryanair “hijacking” had managed “to obtain an account of a direct witness of the actions taken at the control tower in Minsk.” Story has more. <br/>
An Indian court has ordered low-cost carrier Spicejet be wound up over unpaid debts to MRO firm SR Technics, unless it pays a deposit of $5m. The Madras High Court on 6 December issued a stay of judgement for three weeks, on the condition that the deposit was handed over within two weeks. At the heart of the lawsuit is SpiceJet’s “alleged inability” to make payment – more than $24m – for MRO works performed by SR Technics. Both companies signed an MRO contract in 2011, and entered into a supplemental agreement a year later to change the terms of that deal, local media reports indicate. Credit Suisse, acting on behalf of the MRO provider, initiated legal action against the airline for failure to repay its debts under India’s Companies Act of 1956. SpiceJet opposed the suit, claiming that there was “no legally enforceable debt”, as SR Technics did not possess regulatory approval for engine maintenance services. The carrier alleges that there was “fraudulent misrepresentation” on the part of SR Technics, which would void the contract. “Since the agreement falls and is void, Credit Suisse as an assignee does not and cannot have any claim against the company,” adds SpiceJet. <br/>
Australia’s Alliance Aviation has received investment approval for the construction of an MRO facility at Rockhampton airport in Queensland state, as the airline expects longer-term cost savings in moving base maintenance works back to Australia. The new facility — estimated to cost A$60m ($58.4m) — is expected to finish construction by November 2022, with certification and commissioning to follow soon after. Spanning 10,000sqm (107,600 sq ft), the three-bay base maintenance facility — said to be the largest civil aircraft hangar in regional Australia — will support Alliance’s fleet of Fokker and Embraer aircraft. The airline currently operates 11 Embraer E190s, 24 Fokker F100s, 14 F70s, as well as five F50 turboprops. Alliance is also due to take delivery of 19 more E190s in 2022. The announcement comes nearly two years since the carrier started a feasibility study for the construction of a regional base maintenance facility. <br/>