Delta Air Lines was the industry's most reliable in North America in 2022, according to aviation analytics company Cirium, which ranked airlines by on-time arrivals. The company released the results for North American airlines from its annual On-Time Performance Review for 2022 on Thursday. The company tracked over 99% of flights in North America through Dec. 15, before a winter storm brought mass disruptions to flights amid holiday travel this month. On-time flights are those that arrive "within 15 minutes of the scheduled gate arrival," the company said in a news release. Delta Air Lines placed first for the second year in a row, with more than 84% of its nearly 960,000 flights arriving on time. “Congratulations to Delta Air Lines for their excellent punctuality performance in Cirium’s 2022 On-Time Performance Review, getting their passengers to their destination on time across North America as the market revived during 2022," Cirium CEO Jeremy Bowen said in a news release. "Ramping back up operations so quickly after an enforced slowdown is not easy to do." Nearly 72% of the more than 5m flights Cirium tracked through that period in North America made it to their destination on time.<br/>
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As Covid-19 infections surge in China, the US CDC is considering sampling wastewater taken from international aircraft to track any emerging new variants, the agency said. Such a policy would offer a better solution to tracking the virus and slowing its entry into the United States than new travel restrictions announced this week by the US and other countries, which require mandatory negative Covid tests for travelers from China, three infectious disease experts told Reuters. Travel restrictions, such as mandatory testing, have so far failed to significantly curb the spread of Covid and function largely as optics, said Dr. Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota. “They seem to be essential from a political standpoint. I think each government feels like they will be accused of not doing enough to protect their citizens if they don’t do these,” he said. The United States this week also expanded its voluntary genomic sequencing program at airports, adding Seattle and Los Angeles to the program. That brings the total number of airports gathering information from positive tests to seven. But experts said that may not provide a meaningful sample size. A better solution would be testing wastewater from airlines, which would offer a clearer picture of how the virus is mutating, given China’s lack of data transparency, said Dr Eric Topol, a genomics expert and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California. Getting wastewater off planes from China “would be a very good tactic,” Topol said, adding that it’s important that the United States upgrade its surveillance tactics “because of China being so unwilling to share its genomic data.”<br/>
Many Canadians whose travel plans were derailed by flight delays or cancellations are turning to the courts rather than waiting for their complaints to be processed by the agency responsible for enforcing compensation rules. The Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA) — a quasi-judicial tribunal and regulator tasked with settling disputes between airlines and customers — has been dealing with a backlog of air passenger complaints since new regulations came into place in 2019. Those regulations require an airline to compensate passengers when a flight is delayed or cancelled for a reason that is within the airline's control. That backlog spiked after a hectic summer travel season driven in part by a rise in air travel following the pandemic slump. CTA officials told a parliamentary committee in November that the agency is attempting to resolve over 30,000 complaints. It added that some complainants could be kept waiting for their cases to be resolved for as long as 18 months. That's too long for Kevin Smith of Gatineau, Que., who took matters into his own hands by taking his case to small claims court. Smith filed a complaint with the CTA in February after a flight from Vancouver to Ottawa on New Year's Eve was cancelled and rebooked for the next day. "To wait forever for the government to step in and do something about it when they promised that they would, you feel kind of helpless," Smith said.<br/>
Six accused in connection to the 2016 Islamist suicide attack in Brussels that killed 32 people won a small victory on Thursday when a court ruled they should no longer be subject to daily strip searches before being transported from jail. Mohamed Abrini, who prosecutors say fled Brussels airport after arriving there with two suicide bombers, complained on the first day of the trial that these transfers consisted of having to strip and genuflect for searches, being blindfolded and played loud "satanic music" through headphones on the journey. Lawyers for him and five others filed a legal challenge, saying this had not happened during a parallel trial in Paris. Abrini and other accused have said they will not answer any questions while the practice continues. The accused were to have begun testifying last week in a trial in which around 1,000 members of victims groups are seeking answers as to why they or their loved ones were targeted. A Brussels court noted that the European Court of Human Rights prohibited degrading treatment, even in terrorist cases.<br/>
Defence minister Ben Wallace dismissed trade union claims that the country's borders are less secure with military personnel manning immigration desks rather than border force staff, who are currently on strike in a dispute over pay. Border force workers began eight days of strikes just before Christmas at six UK airports. The government drafted in military personnel in their place to minimise disruption. "Our borders are safe and secure," Wallace told reporters on Thursday from Manchester airport. Those helping out when the strikes are on "are carrying out a very straightforward function and of course backed up by computer systems and scans .... that allow us to identify people of worry coming into the country." New Trades Union Congress General Secretary Paul Nowak, asked earlier about reports that UK borders were operating more smoothly since the military stepped in, said that was because they did not have the authority to stop people. "The reason why people are going through our border so easily is because those military personnel don't have the powers to stop people at our borders and effectively the government has decided it's going to open the borders," Nowak told Sky News. He separately accused the government of blocking efforts by unions to reach pay deals. "Rather than sitting down and negotiating in good faith with unions, ministers are sabotaging efforts to reach settlements," he said in a statement.<br/>
Countries are imposing or considering imposing curbs on travellers from China amid a COVID-19 surge there after authorities relaxed "zero-COVID" rules. They cite a lack of information from China on variants and are concerned about a wave of infections. China has rejected criticism of its COVID data and said it expects future mutations to be potentially more transmissible but less severe. Story has a list of new regulations for travellers from China.<br/>
Hong Kong scrapped its closed-loop requirement for international airline crews late on Thursday, ending almost two years of pandemic-related restrictions on flight staff. Transport officials in the Asian financial hub told airline industry representatives of the change, which took effect immediately, people familiar with the matter said, declining to be identified because they were not authorised to speak publicly. The change means that foreign airline crews will not be confined to a quarantine hotel when they are on a stopover in Hong Kong. Previously, international airline crews were not allowed to leave their designated hotel or mingle with anyone outside of their own bubble before boarding their next flight out. Hong Kong did away with closed-loop quarantine rules for locally based airline crews in September. It also brings foreign aircrew rules in line with the situation for ordinary passengers entering and leaving Hong Kong.<br/>
Italy on Thursday urged the rest of the European Union to follow its lead and test travellers from China for COVID, but others said they saw no need to do so for now or were waiting for a common stance across the largely border-less bloc. The EU's health officials could not agree on one course of action when they held talks in the morning and said they would continue their talks later. This was not the first time EU countries were split on COVID policies. At the start of the pandemic there was much debate on what to do, and heated competition to buy safety equipment, before member states pulled together and successfully placed - and shared - joint vaccine orders. Italy "expects and hopes" that the EU will impose mandatory COVID tests for all passengers flying in from China like Rome did, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni told a news conference. The scale of the outbreak in China and doubts over official data have prompted countries including the United States and Japan to impose new travel rules on Chinese visitors as Beijing lifted its restrictions. In the EU, so far only Italy has ordered COVID-19 antigen swabs for all travellers coming from China. This risks not being effective if others in the bloc, where people travel freely from one country to another, will not do the same, Meloni said. The main airport in the Italian city of Milan started testing passengers arriving from Beijing and Shanghai on Dec. 26 and found that almost half of them were infected. But earlier on Thursday, Brigitte Autran, head of the French health risk assessment committee COVARS, said: "From a scientific point of view, there is no reason at this stage to bring back controls at the borders."<br/>
Asian countries are bracing for an influx of Chinese tourists as COVID restrictions are dismantled, and while some are wary, operators in others are preparing packages such as hotpot buffets to cash in on the expected spike in travel. Chinese tourists will no longer need to quarantine on return home starting Jan. 8, the government announced this week, a move that spurred a surge in bookings from what was the world’s largest outbound travel market in 2019. The once $255b a year in global spending by Chinese tourists ground to a virtual halt during the pandemic, leaving a gaping hole in the Asian market, where countries from Thailand to Japan had depended on China as the largest source of foreign visitors. International flights to and from China are at just 8% of pre-pandemic levels, VariFlight data shows, but carriers are looking to ramp up capacity as authorities ease COVID-driven limits on the number of flights. “There is little doubt mainland Chinese are the spark plug for Thailand’s tourism recovery,” said Bill Barnett, managing director of hospitality consultancy C9 Hotelworks. “It’s not a question of if it will happen, it’s now just a matter of how many and how fast.”<br/>
Japan's transport ministry said Thursday the country will conditionally accept direct flights from Hong Kong to airports in Fukuoka, Naha and one near Sapporo after it had initially planned to ban them. The flights from Hong Kong can arrive at the three airports provided there are no passengers who have stayed in China's mainland within seven days, it said. Amid a surge in the number of coronavirus infections in China, the government on Tuesday said it will restrict departures and arrivals of direct flights connecting Japan with mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau to four airports -- Narita, Haneda, Kansai and Chubu. It also requested that Cathay Pacific Airlines, Hong Kong Airlines and Hong Kong Express Airways halt their flights connecting Hong Kong with the New Chitose, Fukuoka and Naha airports. But it decided to change the plan following talks with the carriers. Japan will require all travelers from mainland China and those who visited it within seven days to test for COVID-19 upon arrival starting Friday.<br/>
Sri Lanka on Thursday welcomed the first Russian travellers aboard a new flight service that was launched after the bankrupt nation urged Moscow to help revive its beleaguered economy by sending tourists. Russia was Sri Lanka's biggest source of visitors at the start of the year but arrivals nearly ceased after the invasion of Ukraine and as the Indian Ocean island weathered its worst-ever economic crisis. A commercial dispute also saw direct flights between the two countries suspended for months, prompting then-president Gotabaya Rajapaksa to ask his counterpart Vladimir Putin to resolve the impasse. Thursday's flight by Russian carrier Red Wings, carrying 398 passengers, was the first of a new biweekly direct service between Moscow and the southern port town of Hambantota. "The start of flights to Sri Lanka is a new milestone... a remarkable event for Red Wings, passengers and our countries," the airline's general director Evgeny Solodilin said in a statement. The route complements existing flights between Moscow and Colombo by Russian national carrier Aeroflot, which resumed in October after a four-month suspension. Aeroflot stopped its flights in June after a court ordered its Airbus A330 seized over a commercial dispute with an Irish company.<br/>
The word summing up aviation in Singapore in 2022 is, without a doubt, recovery, with Changi Airport finishing the year top of the Asia-Pacific. As at mid-December, its weekly passenger numbers had reached 75% of those pre-Covid-19, a day-and-night comparison with March’s 18% when borders here and in the region had yet to open. All four of Changi Airport’s terminals are now also reopened and processing steady streams of passengers. The high-profile reopening of Terminal 4 in September and the southern wing of Terminal 2 in October has returned the airport’s handling capacity to 70 million people a year, in time for the year-end holidays.Adding to the positive indicators is Changi’s connectivity, now at 82 per cent of pre-pandemic levels. As at December, 95 airlines were scheduling flights from Changi Airport to 140 cities, including four new places that passengers three years ago could not book flights to – Noumea in New Caledonia, Jeju in South Korea, Pune in India and Sibu in Malaysia. Amid a tentative recovery, eight new airlines have also been added to the airport’s roster, including Aircalin, Cambodia Airways and Thai Vietjet Air. These various indices of passenger numbers, operating capacity and connectivity all point towards Changi Airport’s restoration of its position as Asia’s air hub, exceeding the 50 per cent year-end passenger traffic that at one point seemed a stretch.<br/>