Russia has pledged 19.5b roubles ($238m) in state support for airlines to refund passengers flying on routes that have been cancelled due to sanctions, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin said on Thursday. "The subsidies will be used to refund passengers the cost of tickets on routes that have been cancelled due to external restrictions, which will save carriers their own working capital, which means there will be financial resources to ensure flight safety," Mishustin said.<br/>
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An amendment to EU sanctions last week created a potential path for some aircraft financiers to sell jets held in Russia to the airlines now operating them without permission. The measure, published April 8, will allow EU governments to grant permission for entities in their states to keep receiving payments from Russian companies on so-called financial leases signed before Feb. 26. Ownership of the plane can be transfered once the lease is paid off. It’s not clear how many of the 500 or so foreign-owed planes stuck in Russia are potentially eligible for the exception, or which owners will be able to apply. Most of the aircraft are on operating leases, a different structure under which airlines rent planes for a set period and return them to the owner after the contract expires. Financial leases are typically financing arrangements on new Airbus and Boeing jets. Export credit agencies guarantee about 85% of the amount loaned to the operator by a syndicate of banks. They’re widely used, including by the governments of the US, UK, Germany and France, to help support aircraft sales. Under the amended provision, no economic resources can be made available to the Russian counterpart, except to transfer ownership of the plane after the EU company has been fully reimbursed. The ownership transfer is a consequence of full repayment under contract terms signed before sanctions, a spokeswoman for the European Commission said in an email. The amendment doesn’t allow any funds to be provided to Russian companies, she added, without elaborating further. <br/>
Smaller airlines are looking to bulk up to take advantage of an expected recovery in air travel. Fleet size is a key motive for JetBlue’s recent bid to woo budget carrier Spirit Airlines and break up that company’s deal with rival Frontier. Both JetBlue and Frontier have small fleets relative to legacy carriers like American, United and Delta, which limits their ability to add flights and routes in an effort to compete for business.<br/>Adding Spirit's current fleet would boost JetBlue's by 60% to more than 450 planes. Growing a fleet through a buyout may turn out to be easier in 2022 than purchasing new planes from Boeing and Airbus, which saw a resurgence in orders in 2021 and are working through backlogs. “The way I think about it, it is speeding up what we would have taken years to do," said JetBlue CEO Robin Hayes, speaking with investors about the buyout offer. Hayes said the deal would help give JetBlue the ability to be more relevant in markets where legacy airlines' bigger fleets let them offer more flights and better schedules. It could help JetBlue expand to new cities and offer a wider variety of prices. The deal faces several obstacles. Spirit Airlines would have to scrap its planned merger with Frontier Airlines. A deal with JetBlue could face regulatory scrutiny because the two overlap in some markets. The Justice Department has already sued to block JetBlue’s partnership with American Airlines in the northeast because of such an overlap.<br/>
Flights to and from Alderney have been cancelled for a second day running. Aurigny, the airline which operates the Alderney route, says a "technical issue" with the plane used is to blame for the cancellations and has apologised for the disruption. Steve Langlois, the head of passenger operations at Guernsey Airport, said they appreciate passenger's patience while they fix this aircraft. Aurigny has chartered a boat for passengers and says it will contact customers who are affected. Leah Burton is one of those affected by the disruption. "The first opportunity post-Covid to have all the family come out to Alderney and be together and celebrate, and sadly that's not happened," she told BBC Radio Guernsey. Aurigny has arranged an extra flight each way between Southampton and Guernsey on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, the States of Alderney said. "While it is no comfort to disrupted passengers in the short term, Alderney is working very closely with the authorities in Guernsey, and with Aurigny to develop a far more robust, resilient and sustainable air service for the island, a spokesperson for the States said.<br/>
Baggage handlers have been so short-staffed that entire flights have departed without luggage as the Easter travel crush peaked at Australian airports, with unions warning the pandemic-depleted aviation industry is now structurally incapable of coping with pre-Covid-like levels of travel demand. While unloaded baggage and long queues affected travellers across the country on Thursday, unions have claimed that in Brisbane, so few service workers were available that female cleaners were sent in to clean male toilets while travellers were using them, and male cleaners into bathrooms with female patrons. The pressures of the holiday period, Covid isolation orders, and a workforce cut and outsourced during the pandemic has led to chaotic scenes at airports across the country, just as they record hundreds of thousands of travellers in what will be their busiest periods since before the pandemic. In Melbourne, Guardian Australia can reveal that baggage handlers working on Qantas flights but employed by international company Swissport – part of a controversial and legally contentious outsourcing decision – have been so short-staffed that some planes have been forced to leave without passengers’ luggage loaded on to the flight. At other instances in recent days, flights have left with half of the checked-in luggage, which allows the flights to depart with less delay. Irate passengers who appeared to be on flights affected by shortages of baggage handlers have been told they will receive their luggage in coming days. An airport source said that on one occasion in recent days, just 87 of the 150 bags checked on a flight were loaded on to the plane.<br/>
When I wrote about European starlings and their complex North American origin story, I didn’t expect readers to be so fascinated by one particular word in the article: snarge. But as the emails, tweets and other feedback poured in, it became clear that this gnarly-sounding six-letter word and the field of scientific inquiry that produced it were worth closer examination. On Oct. 4, 1960, a Lockheed L-188 Electra airplane nose-dived into Boston Harbor just seconds after takeoff. Out of 72 crew members and passengers, only 10 survived. As investigators sorted through the rubble, they kept finding globs of what appeared to be black feathers. Such material eventually came to be known as snarge. Best investigators could surmise, the Electra’s engines had ingested a flock of birds, but no one could say what sort of bird could bring down an airplane of that size. So the investigators called Roxie Laybourne, an ornithologist at the Smithsonian Institution who was an expert on feathers. With a vast collection of museum specimens at her disposal, Ms. Laybourne compared microscopic patterns in the feathers. What wrecked the Electra had not belonged to a large-bodied bird, like a vulture, turkey or crow. Rather, the feathers were from to the diminutive European starling. In the decades after, airports would hire wildlife biologists to take the information Laybourne provided and use it to discourage certain bird species from flocking around their flight paths. In turn,Laybourne would become a science and air-traffic safety legend known as the Feather Lady. You’d be just as warranted in calling her the Queen of Snarge. Carla Dove, program manager for the Smithsonian Institution’s Feather Identification Lab andLaybourne’s successor, said she wasn’t sure who first coined the term snarge, but that she first heard it at the museum. Snarge can be a wad of a Canada goose lodged inside an airplane engine. Or it can be a broken and burned gull feather littered along the runway. Snarge can even be as small as a rusty-red smear on the nose of an airliner. Story has more.<br/>
Embraer is moving closer to divesting its air taxi business Eve UAM, saying it expects to close the sale of the business to shell company Zanite Acquisition on 9 May. The sale still requires approval from shareholders of publicly traded Zanite, which has scheduled a shareholder vote for 6 May, Eve and Zanite say on 14 April. The deal would make Florida-based Eve latest among several air taxi developers to become a publicly traded company through a reverse take-over method that gained favour on Wall Street in recent years. Zanite is a so-called special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), a type of entity formed for the purpose of acquiring attractive companies and taking them public. In December 2021, Embraer said it signed an agreement to sell Eve to Zanite in exchange for 220m Zanite shares, valued at $10 per share and equating to a total value of $2.2b. Upon the acquisition, Zanite will remain publicly traded and change its name to Eve Holdings, securities documents show. As part of the arrangement, Zanite has secured agreements to raise $305 million by selling shares to several private investors. That money, combined with Zanite’s existing funds, will leave Eve with $512m in cash once the deal closes. Embraer will own more than 80% of the public company, according to securities documents.<br/>