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JetBlue Airways said on Tuesday it was committed to reducing emissions related to jet fuel by 50% per revenue tonne kilometer by 2035 from 2019 levels. The New York-based carrier, whose targets align with goals of the Paris climate agreement, said it would increase investments in lower-carbon solutions within its operation and would evaluate future sustainability investments with its science-based target in mind. "We are calling on governments, aircraft and engine manufacturers, and fuel producers to support the development of the products and solutions that airlines need to achieve our ambitious goals," JetBlue CE Robin Hayes said. The carrier also added that it would accelerate the retirement of its E190 fleet, with the final E190 aircraft scheduled to exit its fleet in 2025.<br/>

A federal judge cut a flight attendant’s $5.1m jury award to about $800,000 but ordered Southwest Airlines to rehire the woman, who had claimed that the airline and her union conspired to fire her for expressing opposition to abortion. US District Judge Brantley Starr said in a ruling issued Monday that she reduced Charlene Carter’s award to comply with federal limits on punitive damages that companies can be required to pay. Carter charged that she was fired after sending strongly worded messages to the president of the flight attendants’ union to complain that the official had attended the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., the day after President Donald Trump was inaugurated in January 2017. She called the union leader “despicable.” The president of Local 556 of the Transport Workers Union did not respond to that and other messages, but Southwest summoned Carter to a meeting and later fired her.<br/>

Mexican low-cost airline Volaris expects the country to regain its US aviation rating by the last quarter of 2023, it said in a presentation published ahead of its investors' day on Tuesday. The airline said in the presentation it had planning in place to move should Mexico recover the U.S.-issued Category 1 rating earlier, noting that Mexican government authorities had forecast that it could recover the rating as soon as April. The US FAA downgraded Mexico's aviation safety rating in May 2021, saying it fell short of regulating its air carriers "in accordance with minimum international safety standards." The move bars Mexican carriers from adding new U.S. flights and limits the ability of airlines to carry out marketing agreements with one another. In October, Mexico's foreign ministry said it aimed to complete an action plan in December as part of its bid to recover the rating.<br/>

Canadian carrier Porter Airways has rolled out new fare bundles and several other product updates, including available fresh meals – changes the company says make its economy class the industry’s best. Disclosed by Porter on 6 December, the updates coincide with the airline’s pending acquisition of new Embraer E195-E2s. The company has said it will receive its first of those before year end. They will add to Porter’s fleet of De Havilland Canada Dash 8-400 turboprops. Porter currently sells four ticket types, bare-bones “Basic”, “Standard”, “Flexible” and, with all the bells and whistles, “Freedom”. Its aircraft have only economy class seats. Porter will soon overhaul that structure by offering two new overarching ticket products: PorterClassic and PorterReserve. PorterClassic will be its “traditional economy”, while PorterReserve will be a new “all-inclusive economy” product, the airline says. Customers purchasing PorterReserve tickets will have access to separate airport check-in areas, the option to board early and increased-legroom seats. On incoming E195-E2s, those seats will have 36in of pitch and be located in the first four rows; on Dash 8s, they will be in the first two rows and have 32in of pitch, Porter says.<br/>

EasyJet Tuesday averted a French cabin crew strike over the Christmas holidays after it agreed to raise base pay by 7.5% while paying an additional 3,000 euro ($3,152) bonus to staffers. The concession highlights the continued pressure on easyJet and airlines to agree better terms and wages to retain staff and avert more labour strife after months of disruption since the end of COVID-19 lockdowns. "For us this is a good deal to sign so we won't call for a strike this time around," a representative for the SNPNC union told Reuters via text message. Tuesday's deal is one of the more generous for airlines in the region in recent months. It's not clear if it could set a precedent for rival carriers keen to keep staff as energy and food bills soar and inflation hits decade highs. In November, German German carrier Lufthansa agreed to a two-stage raise for next year, with 250 euros more basic pay from Jan. 1, and 2.5% more basic pay from July 1.<br/>

Virgin Atlantic has struck a deal to purchase 10m gallons annually of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) produced by US firm Gevo and supplied via the carrier’s joint-venture partner and shareholder Delta Air Lines. The agreement builds on Delta’s existing long-term partnership with Gevo and increases the use of SAF from the US west coast; the fuel will delivered in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The UK is in the process of setting a mandate, under which 10% of the fuel used by the country’s carriers must be SAF by 2030. ”What we are announcing today, is we have secured 20% of that commitment already,” Virgin Atlantic CE Shai Weiss said today, speaking at a UK Aviation Club event in London. Weiss had called on the UK govenment to take action to progress SAF production in the country at last month’s Airlines 2022 event in London, noting it would in the meantime have no option but to secure SAF from outside the UK. ”If you look at the UK there are no plants in production right now and there is long way to go between the five plants the government is orchestrating and actual technology and capital to go in it. There are many things the government needs to do to get there. We need to scale up by 100 times to get to 10% of aviation fuel and if you believe that long-haul flying is part of the green revolution – which it is – hydrogen and new technologies are all very good, but they are not going to change the physics of flying across the Atlantic in the foreseeable future.” It marks a further airline commitment for Gevo, after Iberia and Qatar Airways both recently struck five-year SAF purchase deals. Meanwhile Virgin Atlantic’s European partner Air France-KLM yesterday disclosed a provisional 10-year deal beginning in 2023 for SAF provision from TotalEnergies.<br/>

Virgin Atlantic CE Shai Weiss is braced for a ”subdued” year in 2023 given global economic headwinds and recession in the UK, though he notes the airline has not yet seen these challenges filter through to forward bookings. Weiss highlighted the strength of demand this year which has helped the airline recover to pre-pandemic revenues despite capacity for the year remaining 20% down on 2019. ”For us it’s been a very good year. Not profitable yet, but a very good year. We will exceed 2019 revenues,” he says. Weiss though points to the war in Ukraine, cost of living crisis, rising energy costs and the impact of political upheaval in the UK. “All these things have an impact on all of us, all our people, our customers and the way we are managing ourselves for 2023,” he says. “So that is what we have dealt with and dealt with quite well.” Notably, the economic outlook for the UK has worsened, with forecasts projecting the country is in a recession it will not emerge from before 2024. “We are not oblivious to the macro-economic and overall backdrop to the environment going into 2023,” says Weiss. ”For our planning purposes, we are assuming there is a deep recession in the UK. Airlines are correlated to GDP, we all know that. So we think there is a very tough period, especially in the UK, and tougher than the [other] G7 [countries]. So that is planning hypothesis towards 2023. Having said that, the bookings we are seeing right now do not indicate a slowdown, and…there is still the corporate traveller to come back in full force,” he adds. ”So we are planning for a very subdued year, but we have not seen a slowdown and I think that is very consistent with what you have seen from other airlines, especially the US.” The brighter performance in 2022 follows a major restructuring after the pandemic – a period in which Virgin as a long-haul-only operator was particularly hard hit by the closure of international borders. ”From April 2020 for 90 days we didn’t fly one passenger,” he says. ”We didn’t get any government support, for reasons that are beyond me. But once we understood that was a condition of our existence, that is what we did. We took some amazingly tough decisions; selling our 747s, A340s, not flying out of Gatwick, letting go 45% of our people.” While he says the steps were taken to ”ensure the business….could survive”, Weiss notes the decisions positioned the carrier beyond pure survival. “We will not unwind them now, because our cost base is so much better – we took GBP300m off our cost base.” Describing the carrier as “fit for purpose” for the future, he says: ”Our job now is to make sure…. that the fix we did during the pandemic and the pain that we took, will serve us well in the years ahead. We have all the ingredients to be a really top-notch company, which we are, but we can go even further.”<br/>

Lenders to bankrupt Jet Airways India Ltd. are resisting a court-approved resolution plan, further delaying the former No. 1 private airline’s return to the skies, according to people familiar with the matter and email communications. The primary dispute is about whether the new owners of Jet Airways need to pay more money into the pension funds of ex-employees, the people said, asking not to be identified because they’re not authorized to speak publicly about the matter. Banks, led by State Bank of India, say Jet Airways’ new buyers — Dubai-based businessman Murari Lal Jalan and Florian Fritsch, chairman of London-based Kalrock Capital Management Ltd. — should pay an additional 2.5b rupees ($30.1m) into the retirement kitty, the people said, an ask supported by the email exchanges reviewed by Bloomberg. The new owners meanwhile have indicated that extra money wasn’t part of the already agreed upon resolution plan and instead must be taken out of the banks’ dues, the people said. All parties are now awaiting fresh guidance from the bankruptcy court due Tuesday, the people said.<br/>