“We’re too low! We’re too low! We’re too low!” The Boeing 737 co-pilot’s frenzied warnings on Sept. 28, 2018 came too late. Within seconds, the Air Niugini Ltd. passenger flight slammed into the waters of the western Pacific, half a kilometer short of the runway at Chuuk in the Federated States of Micronesia. One of the 47 people on board, unbelted and flung forward on impact, was killed before the plane sank. But investigators got lucky. Sitting at the back of the cockpit, a maintenance engineer was recording the flight’s final minutes on his iPhone, just for fun. The footage laid bare the sequence of events almost immediately. It showed the pilot headed toward a storm cell that lit up his navigation screen. He descended blindly through rain and cloud, windscreen wipers flailing, and ignored the order on his flight display to pull up. Six other passengers were seriously injured upon impact, though there were no additional fatalities. Several disasters later -- including two Boeing 737 Max tragedies and the fatal plunge into a hillside in March by a China Eastern jet -- there are renewed calls for aircraft to be fitted with cockpit image or video recorders. The push is reigniting a standoff between pilots who guard their privacy, and crash specialists and bodies such as the US NTSB that are under pressure to solve mystery accidents and prevent them from happening again. Among those advocating for image recorders is air-safety pioneer Mike Poole, who worked for the Transportation Safety Board of Canada for more than 20 years and led its flight-recorder laboratory. Story has more.<br/>
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A leading airline industry official on Tuesday blasted British politicians for criticizing long airport lines and canceled flights once COVID-19 cases eased and in turn assailed Prime Minister Boris Johnson's own response to the pandemic. “You look at the UK, Boris Johnson, he highlights one of the reasons why he should continue to be prime minister as being the way he handled the pandemic. What a joke. They should have done a hell of a lot better,” Willie Walsh, director general of the IATA, told the Paris Air Forum. In response, a British Department for Transport spokesperson said the UK was the first country in the G7 to remove all travel restrictions, but its priority was protecting public health and the measures it introduced "bought vital time for the rollout of our successful vaccine programme." Earlier this month British Transport Secretary Grant Shapps told airlines to stop selling tickets for flights they cannot staff, while Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab recently told Sky News that carriers should have recruited more. Both men serve in Johnson's Cabinet. Johnson survived a confidence vote on Monday. Walsh said airlines could not have recruited staff earlier this year when British traffic was down and industry feared the prospect of new COVID-19 measures. “You have the politicians saying airlines should have ramped up sooner. No, they shouldn’t," Walsh said. "Airlines would have gone out of business had they done what these idiot politicians are saying they should have done."<br/>
Airport ground-handling companies that are crucial to the smooth operation of air travel are racing to fill thousands of jobs that were cut during the pandemic as they seek to ease widespread disruption. Companies like Swissport, John Menzies and Dnata are contracted by airlines to provide vital services ranging from check-in to baggage handling. Global airlines have called for an urgent recruitment drive, after disruption at airlines and airports in the UK, the EU and the US, which has been blamed on staff shortages across the industry. Passengers have over the past week reported a pilot leaving the cockpit to help load bags on to the plane, cabin crew sorting baggage because of a shortage of ground-handlers and crew seen climbing through baggage carousel curtains to hunt for their bags. Swissport, which operates at 285 airports globally, has said it is looking to hire 30,000 staff this summer and has launched campaigns on social media in the UK and US. The company lost 20,000 of its 65,000 workers as part of cost cuts during the pandemic. Dnata, which is owned by the Emirates Group, said it was “actively hiring”, while John Menzies and Esken are also looking for ground-handling staff, according to their websites. “We are hiring like crazy,” one executive said. The IATA said there was a “severe shortage of ground-handlers” after thousands left the industry during the pandemic. “The shortages we are experiencing today are a symptom of the longer-term challenges to achieve a stable talent base in ground-handling,” said Nick Careen, the IATA executive who oversees operations, safety and security.<br/>
Long lines at the Madrid Barajas Airport in recent weeks should ease as the Spanish police work on hiring more staff to deal with the surge in tourism from the easing of COVID-19 restrictions, the government said on Tuesday. With a reinforcement of 500 new hires, more than 1,700 officials will work at Spain’s busiest airports, including in Madrid and Barcelona, to control the flow of foreign tourists that has increased markedly in the past weeks. The long lines in Madrid are similar to problems at airports in Britain, Amsterdam and elsewhere in Europe due to travel resuming as the pandemic eases. To further ease pressure on arrivals, a separate queue will be set up for British tourists, the biggest group of foreign visitors to Spain, so they can use electronic passport gates, a police source said. British travellers will still need to get their passports stamped after using the electronic gates, the source added. International Airlines Group’s Spanish unit Iberia complained on Monday about delays and chaos at Madrid’s Barajas Airport passport control and said around 15,000 of its passengers had missed their flight since March 1.<br/>
Travellers in the UK will be hit by a summer of travel misery as the chief executive of London’s Heathrow airport warned it would take up to 18 months for the aviation industry to return to pre-pandemic levels and the largest rail union announced the biggest strike action in 30 years. Thousands of holidaymakers have been stranded over the last week with hundreds of flights cancelled due to staff shortages and air traffic control delays. “I think it will take 12 to 18 months for the aviation sector to fully recover capacity, so we will have to really carefully manage supply and demand,” John Holland-Kaye, Heathrow’s CE, told a conference. The aviation industry cut tens of thousands of jobs during the coronavirus pandemic and is now struggling to rehire after demand for travel snapped back very quickly this year. Holland-Kaye said ministers could help by further easing the rules around security background and employment history checks for new staff. On Monday 500 staff at British Airways began voting on whether to strike in a row over pay, with the union Unite warning it would time any industrial action with the summer holidays to cause maximum disruption.<br/>