unaligned

Startups Breeze Airways and Avelo Airlines are competitors, shaped by small fleets and point-to-point schedules. That competition is now sparking a battle in the relatively sleepy aviation state of Connecticut, where two airports just 56 miles apart, Hartford and New Haven, are being pitted against one another over expansion demands from the two carriers. Connecticut’s population is about 3.6m. It has long supported Hartford’s Bradley International, which has 42 non-stop destinations that include Los Angeles and San Francisco. Bradley had about 7 million 2019 passengers and is New England’s second-largest airport after Boston Logan. Historically, New Haven’s Tweed, which is managed by a private entity, has been little used, repeatedly tried and abandoned by major carriers, hampered by a short, 5,600- runway and by neighborhood opposition to expansion. Breeze uses Hartford’s Bradley. Avelo uses Tweed New Haven Airport. Kevin Dillon, CEO of the Connecticut Airport Authority, which oversees Bradley, said, “If you start talking about an airline market the size of Connecticut, you need to be careful not to end up with two sick puppies, because you’re trying to spread it too thin.” Breeze began serving Bradley on May 27, 2021, its first day of operation. Founder David Neeleman, a onetime New Canaan resident, said he considered Tweed but picked Bradley. “We felt Hartford was better,” he said. “Hartford is a big city. There are more people there.” Neeleman said the two carriers don’t compete, planned expansion at Hartford indicates Breeze’s success, and Avelo expansion does not concern him. Neither airline’s frequencies are high. “It’s just a few days of flying (each week),” he said. For Breeze, the commitment to Connecticut represents 10 of 70 total routes. Breeze has five bases and serves 28 cities.<br/>

All 125 passenger jets operated by Russia’s Rossiya Airlines, a unit of state carrier Aeroflot, have been transferred to a domestic registry, Tass news agency said on Tuesday. Earlier this month Moscow proposed allowing carriers to register the rights to leased foreign planes and for the planes to be given Russian airworthiness certificates as a way of skirting western sanctions. According to Rossiya’s website, just under 50% of its planes are built by Airbus and Boeing. The rest are produced by domestic plane maker Sukhoi. <br/>

Emirates President Tim Clark said the Russian people have every right to continue travelling regardless of sanctions on the economy, defending the Gulf carrier’s maintenance of regular services despite the invasion of Ukraine. Emirates will carry on operating to Russia for as long as it is told to do so by its owner, the government of Dubai, Clark told Bloomberg Television in an interview on Tuesday. The airline currently serves Moscow twice daily and St Petersburg once a day, linking the cities with its vast global network via a stop in the Gulf state. “These sanctions are not aimed at the Russian people,” Clark said. “The Russian people are just as affected by what’s been going on in Ukraine as everyone else, I suspect.” Passenger loads on the flights are “fairly healthy,” the executive said, including customers traveling for humanitarian reasons, staff from non-profits, diplomats and some tourists. Cargo space is in very high demand, he said. With Russian airlines and many foreign carriers subject to reciprocal airspace bans and other curbs that have greatly curtailed flights, Emirates provides one of the few remaining major arteries linking the country with the rest of the world. Clarke said his airline is also free to overfly Russia and does so on routes to the United States west coast. Emirates is currently profitable and cash positive and is “managing quite well” with the surge in jet-fuel expenses, primarily by increasing fares, Clark said. “We were facing higher oil prices prior to the conflict, and we are dealing with those,” he said. “Unfortunately, that means that prices have to rise to cover the fuel-cost increases.” Clark said that demand is continuing to recover from the coronavirus pandemic. China’s continuing curbs on foreign travel remain and issue, he said, but markets including Thailand, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Vietnam and Indonesia are all improving.<br/>

Dubai's Emirates expects to significantly reduce losses in the current financial year and return to profit next year, the airline's president indicated on Tuesday. "We are in for a good set of results, we haven't reversed it completely but we have swung it," Tim Clark told reporters, adding the carrier had been cash-positive since October. "We've swung the business back to profitability, we are cash-positive again big time, we have a very strong balance sheet again which we have been rebuilding," Clark said. "We are forecasting profits next year and hopefully to pay a dividend and repay some of the equity that the government has put into the business," he added. The carrier's financial year runs through March. In June last year, Emirates got an additional $1.1b in state support from Dubai after the coronavirus pandemic hurt long-haul travel and triggered the airline's first annual loss in more than three decades. Speaking on the sidelines of the World Government Summit in Dubai, Clark said Emirates would not take delivery of A350 passenger jets if they have surface problems similar to those reported by Qatar Airways. "We're not going to take airplanes with degradation. I made clear ... that this has to be resolved prior to delivery to Emirates." Airbus is locked in a UK court dispute with Qatar Airways over the contractual and safety implications of paint and lightning protection damage on existing A350 passenger jets.<br/>

A shortage of slots at major airports and strong consumer demand are underpinning the return of the Airbus A380 into Emirates’ fleet, according to the president of the Middle Eastern carrier. Speaking during the World Government Summit in Dubai today, Tim Clark says that “major issues” with slot availability at airports including London Heathrow, Hong Kong International, Sao Paulo and Sydney are unlikely to be solved in the near term, making larger aircraft strategically attractive. “So long as governments do not invest in airports to create more capabilities, the slot issue is going to become far more acute in the next five or 10 years,” he predicts. With airport balance sheets “shot to pieces” during the pandemic, those investments are unlikely to be forthcoming, in Clark’s view. “That’s why we’re keeping the A380 flying for as long as we can, because those slots are going to be highly attractive,” he states. Moreover, Clark recalls the A380 producing “about 80% of our profits” pre-pandemic and expresses confidence that it can play a similar role in the post-Covid environment, amid “a resurgence of demand across all the countries on our network and the segments within those”. Today, Emirates is “very cash positive, things are going well, we have all these [A380s] flying, and they are going to be more unique going forward”, he says, noting that ”consumer demand for these airplanes is astronomical”. As a result, Emirates has the confidence to invest in its superjumbo fleet. “We’re going to refurbish them, refresh them, put more innovation into them, they are going to be something really special over the next 10 or 15 years,” Clark states, adding: “Watch this space.”<br/>