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The day after Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg met with airline leaders to quiz them about widespread flight disruptions, his own flight was canceled and he wound up driving from Washington to New York. “That is happening to a lot of people, and that is exactly why we are paying close attention here to what can be done and how to make sure that the airlines are delivering,” Buttigieg told The Associated Press in an interview Saturday. Buttigieg said he is pushing the airlines to stress-test their summer schedules to ensure they can operate all their planned flights with the employees they have, and to add customer-service workers. That could put pressure on airlines to make additional cuts in their summer schedules. Buttigieg said his department could take enforcement actions against airlines that fail to live up to consumer-protection standards. But first, he said, he wants to see whether there are major flight disruptions over the July Fourth holiday weekend and the rest of the summer. Enforcement actions can results in fines, although they tend to be small. Air Canada agreed to pay a $2m fine last year over slow refunds. During Thursday’s virtual meeting, airline executives described steps they are taking to avoid a repeat of the Memorial Day weekend, when about 2,800 flights were canceled. “Now we’re going to see how those steps measure up,” Buttigieg said. Travel is back. On Friday, more than 2.4m people passed through security checkpoints at US airports, coming within about 12,500 of breaking the pandemic-era high recorded on the Sunday after Thanksgiving last year. <br/>

Thousands of flights wound up cancelled and delayed during the Juneteenth and Father’s Day holiday weekend, which included the busiest air travel day of the year on Friday, according to the TSA. More than 2.4m people traveled through TSA checkpoints on Friday, according to the agency. The same day, airlines had cancelled more than 1,100 flights by early afternoon, following more than 1,700 cancellations on Thursday, according to the Associated Press. More than 6,300 flights were delayed within, into or leaving the US on Saturday, and 859 flights were cancelled, according to the flight tracking platform FlightAware. As of Sunday morning, more than 1,000 flights within, into or leaving the US had been delayed and more than 700 flights had been cancelled, according to FlightAware. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, and Chicago O’Hare International Airport had the most delays and cancellations on Sunday. Some 2,700 flights were cancelled over Memorial Day weekend. Faced with staffing shortages, and a pilot shortage in particular, many airlines have already cancelled thousands of flights for the summer season, including Southwest Airlines, which cut nearly 20,000 summer flights. Delta is cancelling 100 daily departures from destinations in the US and Latin America, affecting travel from July 1 to August 7. The airline company published an open letter to customers on Thursday acknowledging both the labor shortage and customers’ frustrations with cancelled and delayed flights.<br/>

Federal regulators say Verizon and AT&T will delay part of their 5G rollout near airports to give airlines more time to ensure that equipment on their planes is safe from interference from the wireless signals, but the airline industry is not happy about the deal. An airline industry trade group said federal regulators are taking a “rushed approach” to changing equipment on planes under pressure from the telecommunications companies. The FAA said Friday that the wireless companies agreed to delay some of their use of the C-Band section of the radio spectrum until July 2023. “We believe we have identified a path that will continue to enable aviation and 5G C-band wireless to safely co-exist,” said the FAA’s acting administrator, Billy Nolen. However, aviation groups say the C-Band service could interfere with radio altimeters — devices used to measure a plane’s height above the ground. Pilots use altimeters for landing in bad weather, when visibility is poor. Nolen said planes most susceptible to interference — smaller, so-called regional airline planes — must be retrofitted with filters or new altimeters by the end of this year. Components to retrofit larger planes used by major airlines should be available by July 2023, when the wireless companies expect to run 5G networks in urban areas “with minimal restrictions,” he said. Airlines for America, a trade group for the largest US carriers, said the FAA hasn’t approved necessary upgrades and manufacturers have not yet produced the parts. “It is not at all clear that carriers can meet what appears to be an arbitrary deadline,” trade group CEO Nicholas Calio said in a letter to Nolen. He said safety is jeopardized “by the rushed approach to avionics modifications amid pressure from the telecommunications companies,” and warned that if replacement parts aren’t ready in time, airline service could be disrupted.<br/>

After 21 years as a service agent at Air France, Karim Djeffal left his job during the COVID-19 pandemic to start his own job-coaching consultancy. "If this doesn't work out, I won't be going back to the aviation sector," says the 41-year-old bluntly. "Some shifts started at 4 a.m. and others ended at midnight. It could be exhausting." Djeffal offers a taste of what airports and airlines across Europe are up against as they race to hire thousands to cope with resurgent demand, dubbed "revenge travel" as people seek to make up for vacations lost during the pandemic. Airports in Germany, France, Spain and the Netherlands have tried offering perks including pay rises and bonuses for workers who refer a friend. Leading operators have already flagged thousands of openings across Europe. read more But the industry says European aviation as a whole has lost 600,000 jobs since the start of the pandemic. Yet the hiring blitz can’t come fast enough to erase the risk of cancelled flights and long waits for travellers even beyond the summer peak, analysts and industry officials say. The summer when air travel was supposed to return to normal after a two-year pandemic vacuum is in danger of becoming the summer when the high-volume, low-cost air travel model broke down - at least in Europe's sprawling integrated market. Labour shortages and strikes have already caused disruption in London, Amsterdam, Paris, Rome and Frankfurt this spring. Airlines such as low-cost giant easyJet are cancelling hundreds of summer flights and new strikes are brewing in Belgium, Spain, France and Scandinavia. Story has more.<br/>

Nigeria is withholding $450m in revenue international carriers operating in the country have earned, an executive at the world’s largest airlines association said Sunday. Africa’s largest economy has restricted access to foreign currency for imports and for investors seeking to repatriate their profits as the nation tackles a severe dollar shortage. The IATA’s Vice President for Africa and the Middle East, Kamal Al Awadhi, described talks with Nigerian officials to release the funds as a “hectic ride”. “We keep chipping away and hoping that it clicks that this is going to going to damage the country down the road,” he told reporters in Doha on the eve of IATA’s annual meeting of airline chiefs there this week. Al Awadhi, a former CE of Kuwait Airways, said Nigerian officials had blamed the foreign currency shortage for not repatriating the airline revenue. The Central Bank spokesperson in Nigeria did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<br/>

China on Friday named Song Zhiyong, currently the chairman at Air China, as the new Communist Party chief for the country’s civil aviation regulator, replacing Feng Zhenglin, who is nearing retirement age. Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) made the announcement on its website, citing a decision from Central Organisation Department, the party’s human resource department. Song, who is 57 years old, started out his career as a pilot at Air China. With his appointment as the party chief, he is likely on track to lead CAAC as its administrator, going by past examples, although that decision needs to come from the State Council, the country’s cabinet. Feng, who turns 65 in September - the retirement age for officials above the full ministerial level in China - first assumed the role of party boss in December 2015 before being named as the chief at CAAC in January the following year. He remains as the administrator of CAAC for now. Feng oversaw China’s decision to be the first regulator in the world to ground the Boeing 737 MAX plane in March 2019 following two fatal crashes. The grounding, soon followed by other countries, elevated CAAC’s global prominence at a time when China aims to develop an advanced aviation industry on par with the United States and Europe. During Feng’s tenure, CAAC has also been overseeing certification of the COMAC C919 narrowbody, designed to compete against the 737 MAX and Airbus A320neo families, though it has faced several delays.<br/>

Written off as an oversized anachronism when Covid-19 upended aviation, the world's largest passenger plane is enjoying an unlikely revival to handle an overwhelming rebound in air travel. Many airlines struggled to see a future for their enormous Airbus A380s when the pandemic grounded fleets in early 2020. Qantas Airways parked its 12 double-deckers in the Californian desert, saying they would not be needed for at least three years, while Etihad Airways said it is not clear if its 10 superjumbos will ever fly again. But this year's sudden travel recovery has given the cavernous jets - often seating more than 500 people - a new lease of life. They have become the long range jumbo of choice for airlines from Britain to the Gulf and Australia as passenger volumes stretch aviation workforces that were depleted during the crisis. By the end of this year, monthly A380 flights will be almost 60% of pre-Covid-19 totals, Cirium data show, defying the jet's doubters. British Airways will operate more A380 flights by the end of the year than it did before Covid-19. As international travel returns, the A380's carrying ability is validating - at least for now - the massive bet by its No. 1 buyer Emirates Group of Dubai and proving useful for carriers such as Qantas that did not permanently turn their backs on the giant plane.<br/>

Embraer expects the recent surge in travel to drive demand for regional jets as airlines look to tap new avenues of growth and replace older planes with more fuel-efficient aircraft. The planemaker is currently in discussions with potential customers in North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia for its E2 range of models, Arjan Meijer, the chief executive officer of Embraer’s commercial aircraft unit, said in an interview in Doha. Meijer declined to comment on the size of any potential orders but said that Embraer expects to deliver between 60 and 70 E-jets this year, up from fewer than 50 in 2020 and 2021. Meijer said that legacy carriers want to diversify their networks and overhaul older regional fleets by adding more fuel-efficient aircraft, addressing both higher fuel prices and the need to reduce carbon. As countries reopen borders and Covid curbs fall away, travel has sprung back rapidly. Still, concerns remain about an unprecedented labor crunch that has left airlines and airports struggling to hire back hundreds of thousands of workers who were let go at the height of the pandemic. Spiraling inflation and economic pressures are also putting a question mark over how sustainable the current demand really is. Meijer said that the labor issues were “growing pains” and expected them to be resolved in the short term. Inflation and the consequent increase in interest rates would raise the cost of funding for the industry, he said.<br/>

Demand for medium-haul jets is recovering as air travel rebounds from the pandemic, and aviation sees tentative signs of an uptick in demand for bigger, wide-body sister models, Airbus Chief Commercial Officer Christian Scherer said. "The (narrow-body) market has really picked up," Scherer told Reuters, adding Airbus was in discussions with a number of airlines over future orders. On the industrial side, Airbus faces uncertainty over its supply chains but remains confident of its ability to raise narrow-body jet output by 50% over the next three years compared with current output "cruising past 50" jets a month, he said. "It's true that in the short term, we're facing extreme uncertainty and unpredictability all along the supply chain... which means that there are some slippages right now, but they're not structural," he said. Scherer said an embryonic recovery in demand for larger long-haul jets could push that segment of the market out of the doldrums and towards shortages last seen several years ago. "We could very well be in an undersupply situation on the wide-body side, akin to what we see on the narrow bodies in the mid and second part of this decade," Scherer said. He downplayed reports of further possible delays to the A321XLR, Airbus' newest jet that staged a maiden flight last week. Industry sources have said a three-month delay over regulatory hurdles could extend to as much as a year. "I think it would be highly speculative to throw out numbers on months of delays," Scherer said.<br/>

The Export-Import Bank of the United States Friday said its board of directors approved an $811 million loan guarantee to help finance the sale of Boeing wide-body aircraft to French-Dutch airline Air France-KLM. EXIM said that the loan guarantee would support aircraft assembled at Boeing's Everett, Washington, and North Charleston, South Carolina, factories, which produce 787 jetliners. It did not specify the number of aircraft involved, but KLM had ordered some 15 787-10 aircraft and began to take delivery of them in 2019. Since then, Boeing experienced severe delays in 787 Dreamliner deliveries because of production flaws and has advised airlines and suppliers that deliveries would resume in the second half of 2022, but is still awaiting regulatory approvals. read more EXIM said that the loan guarantee would support hundreds of small and medium-sized business suppliers and about 4,500 jobs in the United States. "This transaction also helps a sector critical to US economic security rebound from the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic," it said.<br/>