star

Thousands of would-be travelers received the same troubling message on Thursday: a last-minute cancellation of their Christmas Eve flight because of the recent spike of Omicron cases. United canceled at least 131 flights scheduled to leave dozens of airports on Friday — along with another 28 that were supposed to take off on Saturday, according to Flight Aware. Other airlines, including Delta, JetBlue and Allegiant, did the same, adding up to 1,404 cancellations as of Thursday evening, the website said. It’s the latest blow to the holiday season caused by the new and highly transmissible Omicron variant, which now accounts for more than 70% of new coronavirus cases. Nearly 170,000 people are testing positive everyday, a 38% increase over the last two weeks, according to The New York Times’s coronavirus tracker. United said that Omicron’s “direct impact on our flight crews and the people who run our operation” led to the cancellations. Crew members had been calling in sick, according to spokesman Joshua Freed, who said that United alerted customers as soon as it could. And while Mr. Freed doesn’t expect the airline will cancel more flights, it remained a possibility. “We are really managing this day by day,” he said. “There may be some more flight cancellations for Saturday. It’s possible.” The airline said it is working to rebook as many people as possible in time for the holidays.<br/>

Lufthansa plans to cut 33,000 flights from its winter schedule due to the spread of the Omicron coronavirus variant and related travel restrictions, CEO Carsten Spohr told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung newspaper. "From mid-January to February, we see a sharp downturn in bookings," he told the newspaper on Thursday, adding that 33,000 flights was equivalent to about 10% of the flight plan. In particular, Lufthansa was feeling the absence of passengers from Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Belgium, which are being hit particularly hard by the pandemic, said Spohr. He said that the German airline would have cut even more flights in January due to weak demand if it didn't have to comply with European Union regulations on slot usage. "We have to operate 18,000 additional, unnecessary flights in the winter just to secure our take-off and landing rights," he said. "While climate-friendly exemptions have been found in almost every other part of the world during the pandemic, the EU does not allow it in the same way," he said."This harms the climate and is exactly the opposite of what the EU Commission wants to achieve with its 'Fit for 55' plan."<br/>

A US judge ordered Air Canada and Lufthansa to preserve travel records for use as evidence by a former high-level Saudi official who claims Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is trying to have him killed. US District Judge Timothy Kelly in Washington ruled the files must be available for use by the former official, Saad Aljabri, in the event that his lawsuit against the crown prince survives a pending motion to toss it out. “The records facing potential destruction are important enough to this case such that their loss would cause irreparable harm to plaintiff,” Kelly said in the decision Thursday. Aljabri’s suit, filed in August 2020, accuses Prince Mohammed of deploying operatives in the US to track him down and then dispatching a team to murder him, weeks after the assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, allegedly on the orders of the Saudi royal. Aljabri argues the airline records will show the movement of his would-be killers, making them crucial to case. He had asked for permission to subpoena the airlines to get immediate access to the data, but Kelly said it was too early for that because he hasn’t yet ruled on a request to dismiss the suit. The prince’s lawyer, Michael K. Kellogg, declined to comment. Aljabri is suing Prince Mohammed -- the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, who is often referred to as MBS -- under the Torture Victim Protection Act and the Alien Tort Statute, which give the US court system jurisdiction over lawsuits alleging certain types of offenses in other countries. He alleges MBS has had two of his children kidnapped in Saudi Arabia and that the prince has threatened others to draw him out of hiding.<br/>

Turkish Airlines has reached an agreement with its labour union for a pay rise of inflation plus 65% for 2022, the Hava-Is union said on Thursday. The flag carrier will offer a further increase of inflation plus 5% for the second half of 2022, followed by a rise of inflation plus 1% for each half of 2023, according to the union, which represents more than 80% of the airline's workers.<br/>

Air India has successfully defended itself against a compensation claim after a UK judge ruled that a delay to a flight operating one leg of a multi-stop journey could not be considered separate from the journey as a whole. The passenger claiming compensation had flown from Kansas City to Bengaluru – via Detroit, London Heathrow and Mumbai – in May 2019. This involved connecting from Delta Air Lines to Air India at Heathrow. But the Air India flight from Heathrow was badly delayed, departing 48h late to Mumbai. Initially a district judge ruled in favour of the passenger, on the basis that the Air India flight from the UK was separate from the inbound services operated by Delta, and should be subject to compensation under European Union rules. At the time the UK was still in the ‘Brexit’ transition process of withdrawing from the EU and still following EU regulations. Air India appealed this decision and a UK Court of Appeal hearing took place in November. Central to the hearing was a previous ruling involving a Royal Air Maroc flight from Berlin to Agadir via Casablanca, the second leg of which was delayed. Even though the flight was operated by a non-EU carrier, and the delayed Casablanca-Agadir leg was entirely outside the EU, judges of the European Court of Justice ruled in May 2018 that the journey should be considered as a whole under a single booking – and that compensation was due because the journey began in the EU. Air India’s representatives argued, during the appeal hearing, that if an airline could not avoid liability because the journey – considered as a whole – involved departing the EU, it could similarly not bear liability if this whole journey, from Kansas City to Bengaluru, did not start or end in the EU.<br/>