unaligned

Allegiant Airlines tumbled the most in 18 months after the carrier reversed its strategy of keeping costs in check by flying only Airbus SE planes, ordering 50 Boeing 737 Max jets. Under the deal, which has a total value approaching $2.5 billion, the airline will buy two versions of the Max to be delivered from 2023 through 2025, Allegiant Travel said Wednesday. The carrier has options to purchase an additional 50 aircraft. “The operating economics are terrific,” Allegiant CFO Greg Anderson said. “When we see the numbers, it makes a lot of sense. We drove a heck of a deal.” Allegiant has previously relied mostly on used or leased aircraft. Investors appeared anxious about the purchase, sending Allegiant’s shares down 8.8% to $176.12, logging the biggest drop since June 2020. Low costs are essential to support the airline’s model of offering heavily discounted, bare-bones fares while charging for items such as coffee and bottled water. Boeing and American depositary receipts of Airbus were little changed. Allegiant is taking 20 Max 737-8-200 models and 30 of the smaller Max 737-7. The Max 8 has a base value of $51m, according to Avitas. The aircraft appraiser doesn’t offer a going price for the Max 7, which hasn’t yet entered commercial service. Covering the cost of new planes typically means keeping them in the air as much as possible. That could threaten Allegiant’s practice of varying its flight schedule daily for demand, Savanthi Syth, a Raymond James Financial Inc. analyst, said in a note ahead of the order announcement. Adding a second fleet type also increases expenses for crew training and parts inventory. <br/>

Flybondi restarted international flights on December 17, 2021, flying outside Argentina for the first time since late March 2020. The Argentine low-cost carrier resumed services to Florianopolis in Brazil and Punta del Este in Uruguay in December 2021. In early January 2022, it reactivated routes to Sao Paulo Guarulhos and Rio de Janeiro Int'l in Brazil. All of Flybondi's international services operate out of Buenos Aires Ezeiza, even though some of them are filed as operating from Buenos Aires Aeroparque. The carrier's domestic flights to 12 destinations in Argentina (soon to be 13 with the addition of Ushuaia) operate from Aeroparque. Without going into details, the carrier promised to add more international destinations in the months to come. The ch-aviation fleets advanced module shows that Flybondi currently operates four B737-800s. It said it would take delivery of the fifth unit of the type by the end of this month, thus restoring its pre-pandemic capacity. During the course of 2022, it plans to double its fleet to ten B737-800s.<br/>

Irish low-cost carrier Ryanair carried 9.5 million passengers in December as demand was clipped in the holiday month by concerns around the Omicron variant of Covid. Ryanair, which has enjoyed a strong return in traffic over the second half of 2021, had originally expected to fly between 10 and 11m passengers in December. However last month it lowered expectations to between 9 and 9.5m as a result of fresh travel restrictions imposed in December. It marks Ryanair’s lowest monthly passenger level since July and follows four consecutive months where it had flown more than 10m. Similarly December’s load factor of 81% was five percentage points down on November, a further sign of the pressure on demand in the month. Ryanair carried just over 62m passengers over the second half of 2021. This compares with a little over 10m over the first half, when tight lockdowns were in place across Europe. It means Ryanair carried around 20m more passengers in the calendar year than it did in 2020, but less than half the 154m it flew in the 2019 calendar year. The Irish carrier has previously indicated it expects to carry only between 6 and 7m in January – rather than the 10m originally envisaged – having cut its capacity for the month amid the Omicron restrictions.<br/>

The CE of EasyJet still expects the low-cost carrier to reach pre-pandemic capacity levels in Summer 2022, despite the uncertainty created by the Omicron variant of Covid-19. Writing in The Times newspaper on 4 January, Johan Lundgren acknowledges there will be “bumps along the road to recovery” but says the airline industry is “poised for a bounceback” in 2022. “We are excited about our plans for next summer, which should see us return to 2019 levels of capacity and beyond,” he states. While “all eyes are on the impact of Omicron on the industry”, Lundgren says he still sees “lots of reasons for optimism”, underpinned by high vaccination rates, Covid-19 protection measures and flexible booking policies. Such developments mean passengers “are more confident in their ability to travel”, he insists. <br/>

Kuwaiti budget carrier Jazeera Airways on Wednesday suspended flights to Kazakhstan's biggest city Almaty as violent protests against the government there continued across the country. "We will provide an update on our operations when we have further information,” an airline spokesperson said by email. The Gulf carrier typically operates weekly flights to Almaty, its only destination in the Central Asian country. Emirati carrier flydubai said it had cancelled a return flight on Wednesday to Almaty from Dubai and that it was following the situation in Kazakhstan. It also flies to the capital Nursultan. Lufthansa and Qatar Airways, who operate regular flights to Kazakhstan, separately said they were continuing to operate services to Kazakhstan but were also monitoring events. A source earlier told Reuters flights in and out of Almaty had been cancelled after protesters took control of the airport there. <br/>