US airlines are poised to raise ticket prices further as Americans shrug off the fastest rise in domestic airfares for decades in their determination to travel. Airfares rose by 18.6% in April from the previous month, the largest one-month increase in the history of the Consumer Price Index, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. They were one of the largest contributors to the 8.3% rise in the CPI last month. On a yearly basis, the airline fares index was up 33.3%, the largest one-year increase since 1980, though prices were still depressed at the same point in 2021 owing to the Covid-19 pandemic. “We hope customers will tolerate [increasing prices] for a long time,” said Jeffrey Goh, CE of Star Alliance, the global airline consortium that includes United Airlines and Lufthansa. But “the industry is not deaf and blind to know that cost of living and rising inflation [are] a risk in terms of the industry recovery”. Demand is outstripping the supply of seats, allowing carriers to pass high fuel and labour costs on to customers. Travel spending is increasing across the board with the fastest acceleration in airfares, so booking momentum should continue, said Michelle Meyer, chief US economist at the Mastercard Economics Institute. Strong wage growth and swelled savings mean consumers “may be able to tolerate price increases for longer, particularly for a type of spend that they are prioritising”, she added. There is also no sign that the current surge in Covid-19 rates has slowed spending on airfares as it had in previous waves. Amid robust, pent-up travel demand, US airlines have remained bullish about summer travel and their overall recovery, despite the inflationary pressures on consumers. “Demand is as strong as we’ve ever seen it,” American Airlines CE Robert Isom said during an April earnings call. American, United, and Delta Air Lines, the three largest US carriers, expect profitable second quarters, with United forecasting record quarterly revenue. The average price across all US airlines for a domestic ticket booked one week before travel was $208 on May 9, up from $188 on May 2, but down from $214 on April 11, according to US bank Raymond James.<br/>
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US airlines are pressing the Biden administration to lift a 16-month-old rule requiring nearly all international air passengers with some exceptions to test negative for COVID-19 before entering the country. Airline executives say many Americans are not traveling internationally because of concerns they will test positive in a foreign country and then be stranded abroad. International US air travel remains down about 15% from pre-pandemic levels. Airlines for America, an industry group, said Friday a survey of its carriers estimated that dropping testing rules would bring in an additional 4.3m international passengers and $1.7b in incremental revenue - and could result in an incremental 1.075m foreign visitors and $2.1b in visitor spending. Crain's Chicago Business reported Thursday that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said he did not think pre-departure rules "will be there forever" but added lifting them would require the CDC to be confident "relaxing it would not harm the progress that we’ve made against the virus." CDC declined to comment. Britain's Transport Secretary Grant Shapps told Reuters and other reporters in Washington on Thursday he discussed the issue with Buttigieg and some US lawmakers. Shapps said dropping requirements have boosted the British economy and not impacted COVID-19 cases. "It works to get rid of it. It's been a massive boost for our tourism, travel industry," Shapps said. He thinks the US is moving toward lifting the rules, but US officials offered no firm indications.<br/>
The United States is facing its worst pilot shortage in recent memory, forcing airlines to cut flights just as travelers are returning after more than two years of the Covid-19 pandemic. The crisis has the industry scrambling for solutions. At least one lawmaker is said to be considering legislation that could raise the federally-mandated retirement age for airline pilots from 65 to 67 or higher to extend aviators’ time in the skies. A regional airline proposed reducing flight-hour requirements before joining a US carrier, and airlines are rethinking training programs to lower the barrier to entry. Earlier this year, Delta joined other big carriers in dropping a four-year degree from its pilot hiring requirements. Several US airlines, including Frontier, are recruiting some pilots from Australia. American Airlines is selling bus tickets for some short routes. But some airline executives warn the shortage could take years to solve. “The pilot shortage for the industry is real, and most airlines are simply not going to be able to realize their capacity plans because there simply aren’t enough pilots, at least not for the next five-plus years,” United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said on a quarterly earnings call in April. Kirby estimated the regional airlines United works with currently have about 150 airplanes grounded because of the pilot shortage. The Covid pandemic halted pilot hiring as training and licensing slowed. Airlines handed out early retirement packages to thousands of pilots and other employees aimed to cut labor bills when travel demand cratered during the depths of crisis. “I feel like I walked away at the pinnacle,” said one former captain for a major US airline who took an early retirement package in 2020. Now airlines are desperate to hire and train pilots, but the rush may take too long to avoid flight cuts. Major US airlines are trying to hire more than 12,000 pilots combined this year alone, more than double the previous record in annual hiring, according to Kit Darby, a pilot pay consultant and a retired United captain.<br/>
Business travel appears to be returning, albeit unevenly, after all but disappearing for most of the pandemic. Despite early predictions that Zoom meetings would supplant face-to-face encounters even after the coronavirus had receded, industry trade groups and hotel companies are pointing to significant upswings in small business meetings as well as larger conventions and trade shows in the last couple of months. Airlines also say bookings by business travelers have recently jumped. What is not returning so quickly, executives and experts say, are business trips by individuals. Some employers continue to set limits on travel. In other cases, because of Covid restrictions, visitors are not allowed in the offices of the people they want to see. And reflecting the disparate pace of the recovery, domestic business travel has returned faster than international, and travel to and from Europe has had a bigger rebound than Asia bookings. Even within the United States, the strength of the return of business travel depends on the destination. In Las Vegas, the number of trade shows and events scheduled is actually higher this year than in 2019. But, said Steve Hill, president and chief executive of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, attendance is projected to be only 60 to 65% of the prepandemic level. In New York, the city’s tourism promotion body forecasts that business travel will not exceed 2019 levels until 2025. Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst for Atmosphere Research, pointed to data on worldwide airline ticket sales that “shows a steady increase in the number of business travel tickets being issued.” That, he said, is “concrete evidence that the rebound in business travel is underway.” Yet for all the positive signs that business travel is taking root again, Russia’s war in Ukraine, China’s “zero Covid” lockdowns and the unpredictable path of the pandemic all threaten to stifle a widespread return to 2019 levels from happening anytime soon.<br/>
A spate of new in-flight connection deals in recent weeks, including the first aircraft contracts signed by SpaceX’s Starlink satellite unit, aim to make high-speed Wi-Fi less glitch-free over the next three years on most domestic flights operated by major US carriers. The latest in-flight deal came Wednesday when Southwest said it would add a second Wi-Fi provider, Viasat Inc., for faster speeds on more than 400 new Boeing Co. 737 Max aircraft. Airlines are racing to offer improved connection speeds and reliability as post-pandemic competition for travelers has stepped up, particularly for high-revenue premium passengers. With expanded satellite bandwidth, the airlines’ goal is to replicate the same internet experience in-flight that people have come to expect on the ground. It’s no longer an amenity just for corporate road warriors, Don Buchman, vice president of commercial mobility at California-based Viasat, said in an interview. “You need to have it—it’s kind of like serving water and coffee,” he said. Elon Musk’s Starlink became the first of several planned low-Earth orbit satellite systems to enter the aviation market last month. Hawaiian Holdings Inc. and Dallas-based JSX Inc. said they’ll offer SpaceX’s Wi-Fi product to passengers for free, though neither carrier has a definitive date for availability. Hawaiian Holdings Inc. said April 25 it plans to equip three aircraft types with Starlink, with the first planned in 2023. Other satellite-based Wi-Fi providers in the rapidly evolving space include Anuvu Inc., which provides service from its own and other satellites; Intelsat SA, which acquired Gogo Inc.’s commercial airline business two years ago; and OneWeb Ltd., a startup partially owned by the UK government that’s working on a service for aircraft.<br/>
Asian aircraft lessors' losses in Russia have risen to nearly $1.2b after Japan's SMBC Aviation Capital, the player with the biggest exposure to the sanctions-hit country, reported the industry's latest financial damage from the Ukraine war. SMBC Aviation's parent, Sumitomo Mitsui Finance and Leasing (SMFL), on Friday announced an 81.96b yen ($635m) Russia-related extraordinary loss for the financial year ended in March. An SMFL spokesperson said the group had 36 aircraft leased to Russian airlines at the time of the Ukraine invasion. Among the 35 it owns, only one was able to be retrieved. The group has written off the value of 34 aircraft still stranded in the country, after taking the pre-received deposits. Despite the losses, SMFL, a joint venture of Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group and Sumitomo Corp., reported a net profit of 35.36b yen, 5% more than the year before. Revenue grew 26% on the year to 1.81t yen, as domestic leasing demand gradually recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic. Aircraft lessors around the world have been hurt by European Union sanctions requiring the termination of all leases with Russian companies by March 28. While the EU sanctions only apply to companies operating in the bloc's member states, many Asian leasing companies base their operations in Ireland for tax reasons. In response to the sanctions, Russia has moved to allow its airlines to hold on to their leased planes and re-register them locally. SMBC Aviation is not alone. Avolon Holdings, co-owned by China's Bohai Leasing and Japan's Orix, last week reported an impairment of $304m for 10 of its aircraft grounded in Russia. For Avolon, the January-March quarter resulted in a net loss of $182m, more than twice the year-earlier loss. Story has more detail.<br/>
US air-safety regulators have told Boeing the documentation it submitted to win approval to resume 787 deliveries to airlines after a year is incomplete, two people familiar with the matter said. The US FAA identified a number of omissions in Boeing’s documentation, submitted in late April, and has sent portions of it back to the planemaker, one of the people said. A second person said it was too early to say whether FAA concerns would lead to a new delay in resuming deliveries, which have been suspended for the past year due to production flaws. Boeing CE Dave Calhoun highlighted the submission in the company’s April 27 earnings call, calling it a “very important step” and saying it was preparing the first 787s for delivery, but stopped short of providing a date. People briefed on the matter say the submission was made shortly before the call. A Boeing spokesperson said the company continues to have a transparent dialogue and work closely with the FAA on the remaining steps. An FAA spokesman declined to elaborate, saying only, “Safety drives the pace of our reviews.” Clearing a swollen inventory of twin-aisled Dreamliners and its best-selling 737 Max jets is vital to the US planemaker’s ability to emerge from the overlapping pandemic and jet-safety crises, a task complicated by supply-chain bottlenecks and war in Ukraine. Deliveries of the 787 have been halted for a year as Boeing worked through inspections and repairs in an industrial headache expected to cost about $5.5 billion. Boeing has more than 100 of the advanced composite twin-aisle jets parked in inventory, worth about $12.5b.<br/>
European safety regulators are seeking to modernise the approach to diagnosing and treating mental health conditions for pilots and air traffic controllers, through an assessment of new medical developments. Recommendations for changes will be part of a research programme for which the European Union Aviation Safety Agency is organising a call for tenders. EASA says the state of pilots’ and controllers’ mental health was already being considered by the aviation medicine community as the “most difficult” aspect to assess during safety evaluation, even before the fatal Germanwings Airbus A320 crash – deliberately initiated by the first officer – in the Alps in March 2015. The authority says mental health “became a priority at global level” in the aftermath of the crash, with a large number of stakeholders and regulators requesting more certainty over needs and fitness-assessment methods. “In all mental health pathologies, including addictions, denial and dissimulation are the typical symptoms,” says EASA. “For this reason, mental health conditions are very difficult to identify, especially in the case of intelligent individuals.” It adds that mental health assessments have varied aims – some intend to evaluate fitness to perform, others the synergy for specific operations, or to identify effects triggered by certain circumstances. “Currently, there are no specific, validated mental health assessment methods for aviation use, incorporating the specific operational needs, to address the issues identified,” says EASA. “Research is needed to further detail the specific needs, and to develop and validate assessment methods or to assess the applicability of existing methods for use in the aviation environment.” <br/>
Are you unfazed by heights, able to swim, not visibly tattooed, either taller than 5 ft 2in or possessed of extraordinarily long arms, and able to survive on GBP16k basic a year? Then there is a pretty good chance an airline needs you. Cabin crew are just a few of the roles the aviation sector has been desperately trying to fill after the bounceback from Covid. Employees were axed en masse as the pandemic hit and flights were grounded, with British Airways alone shedding 10,000 people. Now those aviation businesses that cut to the bone have been unable to recruit fast enough after the government suddenly lifted all travel restrictions in March, fuelling a surge in bookings. At the more glamorous end of aviation, there is still no shortage of applicants: BA is holding wings ceremonies, where newly qualified cabin crew are given their silver winged badges, almost daily. Staff shortages that led to chaotic scenes in departure lounges at Easter continue to play out. Last week, Manchester airport was still grappling with 90-minute security queues, while Birmingham International forced passengers to wait outside its terminals, so they could tell which queue was which. The Midlands airport laid off almost half its staff during the pandemic. Both are in the midst of training up new security officers – and like virtually all airlines and airports, have been racing to recruit. However, they have emerged into a much tighter labour market – and having paid staff to leave, many businesses are now forced to offer incentives to get them back.<br/>
Air traffic control came to a stop for parts of Thursday morning and afternoon in Jamaica, forcing flight cancellations and leaving thousands of frustrated passengers stranded there or unable to reach the Caribbean island. MBJ Airports Limited, the operator of Sangster International Airport near the popular resort destination of Montego Bay, confirmed in a news release to CNN that flights were canceled on Thursday morning "due to the suspension of air traffic services." The airport's arrivals board started showing cancellations around 9:30 a.m. local time on May 12. The departures board also starting posting cancellations around 10:30 a.m. American, Delta, JetBlue, Southwest and United flights were canceled, among others. It was a similar story at Norman Manley International Airport in Kingston, the capital city. Arrivals started being canceled around 11:30 a.m., and departures were canceled starting at 12:19 p.m. Kurt Solomon, president of Jamaica Air Traffic Controllers Association, said that flights were resuming as of 5 p.m. local time on May 12. Robert Nesta Morgan, minister without portfolio with responsibility for information in the Office of the Prime Minister, posted a news release on his Twitter account confirming that flights were resuming. "The Jamaica Civil Aviation Authority (JCAA) wishes to advise the public that, as dialogue progresses between the Authority and its key stakeholders, particularly the Jamaica Air Traffic Controllers Association (JATCA), air traffic services are currently being restored," the release said.<br/>
Southeast Asia is emerging as a key aircraft maintenance hub, and the chief executive officer of a relatively new player says his company is betting big to take advantage of expected further growth in demand. Established in 2018, AirAsia-affiliated Asia Digital Engineering maintains, repairs and overhauls aircraft for the budget carrier and other customers. It, like the airline, falls under Capital A, which is led by Malaysian businessman and AirAsia founder Tony Fernandes. Mahesh Kumar, ADE's CEO, said the company has seen a spike in demand for aircraft maintenance and repair in the region and is in discussions with foreign companies looking for opportunities. He said it is currently raising 400m ringgit ($91m) in debt-equity financing. Of that, 250m ringgit is to be used to construct a new maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) facility near Kuala Lumpur International Airport. "We have received queries from various airlines seeking an MRO partner in Southeast Asia due to strategic location and cost competitiveness," he said in a recent interview. He declined to name them for reasons of confidentiality. According to research firm Mordor Intelligence, Southeast Asia's aircraft MRO market covering commercial, military and general aviation was worth more than $4.5b in 2021 and is forecast to record compound annual growth rate in excess of 8.5% from 2022 to 2027.<br/>
Plans by Airbus to host its largest investor meeting in three years have been postponed after the keenly awaited presentation clashed with Queen Elizabeth's jubilee, ruffling feathers among the aerospace giant's British investors and staff. Airbus officials have written to participants acknowledging the date for the Capital Market Days was "inconvenient" and set a new date of Sept. 22-23. The original date of June 2-3 overlapped with two public holidays at the start of celebrations to mark Queen Elizabeth's seven decades on the throne and raised eyebrows in Britain, where 14,000 employees build the wings for Airbus jets. The company is the biggest supplier of large aircraft to the Royal Air Force, which plans to hold a jubilee fly-past likely to include Airbus transporters on June 2. The plan had also upset UK analysts forced to abandon family holiday weekends to travel to France for the event. "The Brits were revolting," quipped Vertical Research analyst Rob Stallard. The company was eventually forced to rethink the idea after airlines extended summer schedule cuts to June, in a reminder of the incomplete recovery seen in the planemaker's core markets.<br/>
China on Saturday completed a test flight of the country's first C919 jetliner to be delivered, the official Xinhua news agency said. The jet, produced by state-owned manufacturer Commercial Aircraft Corp of China (COMAC) took off from Shanghai's Pudong Airport and flew for over three hours, it said. Plane production has been dogged by certification woes as tough U.S. export rules have delayed the shipment of spare parts. China Eastern and COMAC signed a C919 procurement contract in Shanghai on March 1, Xinhua said.<br/>