When Sarah McElrea arrived at the Anchorage airport last Friday to pick up the 800 pounds of honeybees she was having shipped from Sacramento, she got the first sense of a disaster in the making: The bees — some five million of them — were in Atlanta, not Anchorage. The 200 crates of bees were the first of two shipments coming in from Sacramento designated for more than 300 beekeepers in Alaska and to provide much needed pollination services for apple orchards and nurseries, she said. Previous honeybee shipments had made their way to Alaska aboard Delta Air Lines flights from Sacramento to Seattle and then on to Anchorage, a route Ms. McElrea has used many times. But this shipment, the airline told her, did not fit aboard the Seattle-bound flight and instead had been rerouted through the Delta hub in Atlanta. The bees would complete their circuitous, cross-country journey to Anchorage on Saturday. McElrea was worried, considering that shipping bees comes with certain complications: The bees must be fed along the way (generally sugar water), and they must be kept cool. Her concerns were well-placed — millions of the bees would die. Since the handling of the bee shipment, Delta has “engaged the appropriate internal teams to take immediate action to ensure events of this nature do not occur in the future,” said a spokeswoman for the company. Another spokeswoman, Catherine Salm, told Alaska Public Media, “We have been in contact with the customer directly to apologize for the unfortunate situation.”<br/>
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Amsterdam's Schiphol airport has asked airlines to cancel flights over the weekend to avoid chaos due to overcrowding at Europe's third busiest airport, it said on Thursday. The airport said it had taken the action due to staff shortages. An unannounced strike among baggage handlers aggravated major delays and cancellations at the airport on April 23. read more Schiphol said in an email to Reuters it had "asked airlines to reduce the number of local departing passengers this weekend by cancelling bookings, and not accepting new bookings from Schiphol in the period from 2 to 8 May." "This is an annoying but necessary measure to reduce the number of passengers," it said. The airport said it advised travelers to contact their airlines for information on specific flights. Schiphol was not available for further comment on how many flights would be affected. Dutch news agency ANP reported that KLM, the Dutch arm of airline Air France-KLM, expected to cancel several flights on Friday.<br/>
Air France pilots who reported their Boeing 777 was failing to respond while preparing to land earlier this month simultaneously pulled the controls in opposite directions, French investigators said. Flight 11 was on final approach to Paris Charles de Gaulle airport with 177 passengers onboard after a six-hour trip from New York when the landing was abruptly aborted on April 5. In a radio exchange circulated on the Internet, a pilot was overheard in the background exclaiming “stop, stop” and the captain told the tower the jetliner was “all over the place”. In a preliminary report, France’s BEA air accident investigation agency said the two pilots “simultaneously made inputs on the controls” during a go-around for a second attempt. The agency has classified the event as a “serious incident”, an industry term meaning it could have resulted in an accident. “The captain held the control column in a slightly nose-down position while the co-pilot made several, more pronounced, nose-up inputs,” the report said. “Our crew are trained and regularly rehearse procedures that are practised by all airlines,” Air France said. Boeing declined comment. The Boeing 777 is equipped with control columns that move in sympathy with each other to aid co-ordination. Experts say only one pilot is usually expected to be actively flying at a time.<br/>
Aeroflot has been temporarily suspended from the SkyTeam alliance membership. Although SkyTeam did not mention any reason for its decision, it is likely a punitive measure for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. SkyTeam said: “SkyTeam and Aeroflot have agreed to temporarily suspend the airline’s SkyTeam membership. We are working to limit the impact for customers and will inform those affected by any changes to SkyTeam benefits and services.” Established in 2000, SkyTeam is headquartered in Amsterdam and is one of the three major airline alliances across the globe.<br/>