Southwest will temporarily offer travelers free Wi-Fi on certain flights starting this week, part of a test to bring faster internet to more customers. The carrier has outfitted 40 of its Boeing 737s with upgraded hardware for its Wi-Fi service, according to a memo to employees sent Tuesday. Southwest’s Wi-Fi upgrades are the latest effort by an airline to improve connectivity on board. Hawaiian Airlines last week said it plans to offer free Wi-Fi as early as next year via SpaceX’s Starlink service, which it hopes will bring fast internet to passengers on long trips over the Pacific Ocean. Delta CEO Ed Bastian has repeatedly said the airline plans to offer free internet connection. The carrier trialed the complimentary access before the pandemic. The free Wi-Fi on Southwest will be available from May 4 through June 10 on certain flights in the western U.S., Tony Roach, vice president of customer experience and customer relations, wrote in the memo to staff. The airline currently offers Wi-Fi for $8 per day and says on its website that it blocks access to some high-bandwidth sites such as Netflix, HBO Max and Zoom. “This trial will allow Customers to stream, browse, and engage on the internet at no cost just like other complimentary services,” Roach wrote. “Our goal is to evaluate how the new hardware improves performance while delivering a reliable internet experience used by a large volume of Customers.” Southwest declined to provide more detail.<br/>
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A Canadian flight crew could be sent back to jail in the Dominican Republic as soon as Tuesday amid an ongoing case involving packages of presumed cocaine found onboard an aircraft they were operating, the airline says. In a letter sent to Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly, Pivot Airlines CEO Eric Edmondson appealed to the government to do more to intervene. “We are reaching out to you to request your urgent assistance in ensuring the safe return of the Canadian aircrew being wrongfully held in the Dominican Republic,” Edmondson wrote. “For more than 24 days, our crew has been subject to threats against their lives, inhumane treatment, and arbitrary detention, for dutifully reporting a crime and averting a potential aviation disaster. We are deeply concerned for their safety and are pleading with you to intervene so they may return home to their families.” Edmondson said that on April 5 while conducting a commercial charter, the crew discovered suspected contraband in a maintenance compartment and “immediately reported” it. “Despite following Transport Canada approved policies and international laws, the crew were immediately detained by local authorities,” the letter said. The aircraft was set to fly from Punta Cana to Toronto, Dominican officials said.<br/>
The deadline has arrived for Flair Airlines to respond to Canada’s transportation watchdog over foreign ownership concerns, but experts say we could be waiting weeks or months to find out the fate of the ultra-low cost carrier. The Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA) found in a preliminary ruling released in March that Edmonton-based Flair might not be Canadian enough to qualify for its licences to fly in the country. The watchdog set a May 3 deadline for Flair to formally respond to the concerns, giving the airline a 60-day window to get its balance sheets in order. The CTA did not confirm whether Flair met this date on Tuesday, but said it would provide an “update” to the review on Wednesday. The agency said a panel assigned to the case will review Flair’s submission and decide next steps from there, adding there is “no specific timeline” for when a decision will be made. “The panel will consider all evidence and if it determines at the end of the process that Flair is not Canadian, Flair’s licences would be suspended,” a CTA spokesperson reiterated Tuesday. A spokesperson for Flair also would not confirm Tuesday whether the airline had submitted its response, saying instead that “the airline is working closely with the CTA to resolve the matter, but would have no further status updates.”<br/>
Global supply chain issues mean Air Baltic is looking to carriers including Ukraine International Airlines for short-term leased capacity as maintenance schedules for its own jets are extended. The all-Airbus A220-300 operator announced on 30 April that it was wet-leasing one UIA Boeing 737-900ER from 1 May on a short-term basis, while Cirium fleets data also shows the carrier has a single Airbus A319 on lease from Romanian charter carrier Dan Air – formerly Just Us Air. Furthermore, schedules show Air Baltic is set to operate an Embraer 190 on some services in the coming few days, but details on its provenance are unavailable. Rather than reflecting a fundamental lack of capacity at the airline, however, the inbound leases come amid a short-term issue with sourcing spare parts for the carrier’s A220 jets, Air Baltic explains. “Alongside global supply chain issues, the airline is currently experiencing a lack of spare parts for its aircraft, therefore some of the maintenance schedules are extended,” it says. “The length of the wet lease will be adjusted to company’s needs. Such a decision enables the company to ensure its planned flight schedule.” Air Baltic would not be lacking capacity without the spares issues, having said during a recent financial results briefing that its home markets were recovering more slowly than it had hoped – notably amid its near-neighbour Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – and that it was wet-leasing out at least 12 of its 34 A220s to carriers including Eurowings and SAS.<br/>
Low-cost European airline Wizz Air saw a more than 500% increase in the number of passengers carried in April as the recovery in the travel sector picked up pace. The Hungarian airline, which is listed in London, said it carried 3.6m passengers last month, up 542% on the 564,634 who flew with the group a year ago when the coronavirus pandemic and restrictions hammered demand. Wizz Air recently bought extra slots at Luton Airport from Vueling, boosting services on existing routes to Romania and Poland and adding another 167,000 seats. It said it now has more than 5.6m seats available on flights for the summer season, with new routes across its network from Italy, the UK, Romania, Poland, Lithuania and Bosnia and Hercegovina to destinations across Europe. New routes offer destinations in Greece, Germany, Denmark and Croatia. Wizz Air said last month that it expects to fly more over the summer season than in 2019 before the pandemic struck as the ending of Covid-19 travel restrictions has put holidays firmly back on the agenda. It also revealed at the time that it was trading better than expected thanks to the bounceback, despite suspending flights to and from Ukraine, Russia and Moldova due to the Ukraine war. The planes it used to fly there are now being used on different routes. The update comes after rivals easyJet and British Airways were hampered over the Easter getaway by a raft of flight cancellations, which was blamed on coronavirus-related staff absences and delays in processing security checks for new airline crew. But, despite the disruption, Luton-based easyJet said its summer flight bookings were exceeding pre-pandemic levels.<br/>