Canadian airline WestJet will base all seven of its Boeing 787-9s at its Calgary hub as a part of a strategy shift which will see the carrier double its capacity in the city by the end of the decade. The 5 October announcement comes in the context of a partnership between the airline and its home province of Alberta. The airline says that it will “invest aircraft capacity, with an asset value in excess of seven billion dollars, in Calgary alone, through significant fleet commitments to be based within the province”. ”WestJet will designate [Calgary] as its single global connecting hub and will concentrate all intercontinental 787 Dreamliner flying in Calgary, unlocking opportunity for new routes within North America, to Europe, with the potential to reach Asia,” the company adds. In August, WestJet chief executive Alexis von Hoensbroech told FlightGlobal that the carrier would be pulling back on its international network, and bringing all widebody aircraft to the western part of the country as part of a new strategic shift. However, he did not specify to which city. Asked about Asia routes, he responded at the time, “That’s certainly something we will look at, yes.” The shift west promises to make Calgary ”North America’s most connected mid-sized city”, von Hoensbroech now says.<br/>
unaligned
Winter has long been a low season for air travel in Europe with the seasonal fluctuation from peak summer months greater than in many other global markets, including the US. This winter is proving no different, but the added challenges of high inflation and energy costs is weighing on some airlines, particularly the startups that launched during the pandemic. Flyr, a Norway-based startup that took off in June 2021, said Tuesday that it would cut its winter schedule drastically. Instead of flying a planned 12 aircraft, the airline will operate just five or six and suspend flights to all but a few key markets — including Alicante, Barcelona, Paris, and Rome — of the 27 destinations it served in September. The cuts, plus involuntary staff furloughs, aim to reduce expenses by half this winter and minimize cash burn to 400m Norwegian kroner ($38m). On top of the macroeconomic issues, Flyr CEO Tonje Wikstrøm Frislid said competition with legacy carriers, an age old challenge for any startup, was also challenging. “It has taken longer than expected to build loyalty among business travelers on domestic routes in Norway, where the incumbent carriers maintain large market shares,” he said. Another Norway-based startup, Norse Atlantic Airways, is not doing much better. The carrier will suspend its flights to Los Angeles from Berlin and Oslo for the winter — routes previously planned to be flown year round — in what amounts to a 28 percent cut to planned capacity for the November-through-March period, according to Diio by Cirium schedules. “The winter season is historically more challenging for the industry and this year faces the additional burden of high fuel prices, increasing inflation in the markets that we operate and uncertainty in overall demand,” a Norse spokesperson said. “We have taken action to trim certain frequencies from Oslo and Berlin to the U.S…. The routes that we will continue to operate throughout the winter schedule are in strong demand.”<br/>
About 30,000 passengers will likely be affected by a one-day strike by pilots at Eurowings on Thursday, said Lufthansa's budget airline, which added that it was doing everything it could to minimize the strike's consequences. The airline said on Wednesday it expects to be able to operate about half its usual schedule of just over 500 flights. The action will affect only Eurowings Germany flights, not those of Eurowings Europe. Pilots' union Vereinigung Cockpit (VC), which announced the strike on Tuesday after 10 rounds of talks failed, wants Eurowings to ease pilots' workloads by, for example, cutting the amount of time a pilot would have to be on duty or increasing their rest periods. A Eurowings board member, Kai Duve, said in a statement that the demands endanger the viability of the airline.<br/>
Aer Lingus is in discussions with multinational Kyndryl over a systems failure that hit more than 30,000 of the airline’s passengers last month. Damage to a fibre optic cable combined with the failure of its IT contractor’s backup knocked out the carrier’s passenger processing system on Saturday, September 10th, stranding or delaying 32,000 people. Aer Lingus corporate affairs chief Donal Moriarty told the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport that the company was in talks with the IT provider, Kyndryl, over issues from the system failure. “We are engaging with the provider on the consequences for both ourselves and our customers from the outage,” he said. He was responding to committee member, Fine Gael Senator Jerry Buttimer, who asked if the issue was likely to go to court, and argued that the IT provider should also be held accountable for the problem that affected Aer Lingus passengers. Aer Lingus chief customer officer Susanne Carberry told the committee that almost 7,500 customers subsequently sought compensation from the airline. “We have successfully processed 91% of them,” she added.<br/>
Norwegian carrier Flyr is looking at options to reinforce its finances, and has engaged advisers to hold discussions with existing and potential new investors. Flyr is cutting back its operations for the winter in an effort to reduce costs and it states that the talks are based on its revised business plans. “The purpose of these meetings is to discuss potential financial instruments to strengthen the company’s financial position,” it says. “There is still significant interest in Flyr’s concept and attention to what Flyr has delivered up to now.” Flyr raised NKr250m ($23.6m) in the second quarter half but shelved plans for a further share issue over its stock price. The carrier served 38 destinations over the summer. But Flyr is reducing its route network, particularly within Norway, stating that demand for domestic flights is “falling considerably”, with load factors reaching only 54% in September. “[This] is a trend that we expect will continue through the winter,” says CE Tonje Wikstrom Frislid. Its European services fared better with an average load factor of 82%. Over the first half of the year Flyr turned in an operating loss of NKr492m, including a NKr279m loss for the second quarter. <br/>
British airline Virgin Atlantic on Wednesday decided to suspend its Heathrow-Hong Kong services, close its Hong Kong office and not resume flights in March 2023, after 30 years in the Asian city due to issues related to the closure of Russian airspace. Moscow's invasion of Ukraine has led several airlines, which were already reeling from the impact of COVID-19 pandemic, to suspend flights and plan longer routes to avoid Russian and Ukrainian airspace. "Significant operational complexities due to the ongoing Russian airspace closure have contributed to the commercial decision not to resume flights in March 2023 as planned," the airline founded by billionaire Richard Branson said. Virgin Atlantic had halted flights to Hong Kong since December last year and several airlines have not routed flights through Russia's airspace after the invasion of Ukraine.<br/>
Last month, when a Ryanair passenger tweeted a complaint about the lack of a window by her exit row seat, she might have expected Europe’s largest airline to offer an apology using language straight out of a customer service manual. But this wasn’t British Airways or Lufthansa. It was a no-frills carrier that might best be described to Americans as the Spirit Airlines of Europe — if Spirit had the most savage Twitter presence of any brand in the sky. In response to the window complaint, Ryanair’s account shot back, reposting the passenger’s picture with a sloppy circle drawn around the tiny, round window on the exit door as if to say, “there’s your window.” According to a LinkedIn post by Michael Corcoran, the airline’s head of social media, the reply racked up more than 55m views, mentions in dozens of news articles and a shout-out from Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show.” It was just another day for Corcoran’s team, whose mission is to be the “most talked about brand on social media,” Corcoran said in the post. At the core of their strategy: Don’t sound like the other companies. On Twitter, Instagram and TikTok, the company has endeared itself to millions of fans with its crude call-outs of British prime ministers, subtle digs at customers and general bucking of the typical corporate voice. The voice of the account doesn’t just sound human. It sounds like a hilarious member of Gen Z: fluent in the latest memes, ready to pounce on bad takes and eager to troll for likes. Felicity McCarthy, a social media consultant based in Dublin, said Ryanair’s social media strategy revolves around being “unapologetic” and “a little bit bolshie,” a British word that Macmillan Dictionary defines as “deliberately creating problems and not willing to be helpful.”<br/>
An Australian man has said he was made to feel like a “second-class citizen” by being lifted on to a Jetstar flight in Darwin, as disability advocates call for a complete overhaul of the way airlines treat passengers. Brad Wszola, 50, suffered a spinal cord injury in 2016. He uses a wheelchair, but was not able to navigate the gap between the air bridge and the plane when boarding a Jetstar flight from Darwin to Cairns on 12 August. When his wife, Jenny, asked airline staff for a ramp to bridge the gap, she was told Darwin airport did not provide any. His wife and a staff member had to lift him over the gap to transfer to the aisle wheelchair provided inside the plane. “Watching these people having to lift me, to bend down, Jen had to bend down below the level of the floor of the plane, bend over and grab the bottom of the aisle chair to lift me … That put myself at risk, also the staff at risk and Jenny at risk,” Wszola said. “She was the one helping lift me into the plane.” He said having a ramp available at every airport around the country was an “inexpensive no-brainer” that would allow everyone to travel. It wasn’t the only time they felt mistreated on the trip – on arrival in Darwin, Wszola said, the airline did not bring his chair to the air bridge, instead sending it to the baggage carousel with the other passengers’ luggage. “When we got down to the carousel there was no wheelchair, my wheelchair came out last,” he said. “So I’m stuck in this chair that I can’t get around in.”<br/>