general

A group representing major US airlines said Tuesday it does not foresee a return of significant international passenger air travel demand from either China or Japan before the end of March and sought an extension of a waiver of some US COVID-19 international route requirements. Airlines for America, a trade group representing major US carriers, told the US Transportation Department that airlines "do not foresee significant and certain international passenger growth in either China or Japan before" the expiration of a current USDOT waiver. The group added ticket sales for the U.-China market as of December remained 88% below 2019 levels, adding passenger demand for both markets remains "severely depressed." Airlines have receives a series of waivers since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic from "use-it-or-lose-it" constraints for some international services. The group added that "international air travel to China remains severely depressed due to cumbersome, uncertain, and constantly evolving travel requirements and entry barriers." The group cited new testing requirements for travelers from China to the United States, implementation of revised travel and visa requirements for entry into China and the ongoing temporary refusal of tourism visa and "implementation of restrictions in other jurisdictions for travelers coming from China." The United States imposed mandatory COVID-19 tests on travelers from China effective Jan. 5.<br/>

The Justice Department on Tuesday asked an appeals court panel to reverse an April 2021 ruling that declared unlawful a government order requiring masks on airplanes, buses, trains, ridesharing services and at airports and other transportation hubs. A three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments on the government's appeal of a ruling by a US district court judge in Florida that found the US CDC lacked legal authority to issue a nationwide travel mask mandate to combat COVID-19. The CDC issued the sweeping mask mandate in January 2021, days after Joe Biden became president. A report from US lawmakers in October said the Trump administration in 2020 blocked the CDC from adopting a federal transportation mask mandate. Much of the arguments in the appeal focus on the CDC's decision to put in place the requirements immediately rather than give the public a chance to comment on the mandate. Justice Department lawyer Brian Springer said the CDC could impose mask requirements without giving the public time to comment given the pandemic emergency, arguing it was necessary "to prevent the possible infections and deaths that could result if people didn't do the simple thing of just putting on a mask while they were traveling." Lawyer Brant C. Hadaway representing the five people who had sued to challenge the mandate noted the CDC last year had not sought a stay of the district court's ruling.<br/>

US airlines are requesting an extension of airport slot waivers for certain long-haul flights that have been in place since Covid-19 disrupted international travel in March 2020. Airlines for America (A4A), a lobby group representing 10 major US airlines and Air Canada, said in a letter to the US Department of Transportation (DOT) on 17 January that “international flight operations and passenger demand” to certain markets in Japan and China “remain severely depressed”. Therefore, airlines that operated numerous weekly flights to the region prior to the global pandemic will not reinstate those flights yet, meaning they will continue not to use assigned slots at slot-restricted airports across the country. “International air travel to China remains severely depressed due to cumbersome, uncertain and constantly evolving travel requirements and entry barriers,” the letter reads. These restrictions “suppress demand and prevent our members from being able to operate their limited-entry frequencies”. A similar situation exists in Japan, especially on flights to Tokyo’s Haneda International airport. “While Japan is starting to reopen to international travel and, as a result, the US-Tokyo demand environment is improving, the pace of the rebound has been sluggish and forward-looking demand remains choppy,” the letter adds. The FAA has granted slot-waiver relief to carriers operating from several slot-restricted airports since the rapidly-spreading coronavirus nearly shut down international aviation in March 2020. That means that airlines were able to keep their allocated slots at capacity-constrained destinations like New York’s John F Kennedy International airport, even if they did not fulfil rules that normally require them to use 80% of the slots to avoid losing them. The order has been extended several times. The latest extension is scheduled to expire at the end of the winter travel season, on 26 March. A4A is now requesting the waiver continue through the summer travel season, which ends on 29 October. “Our members do not foresee significant and certain international passenger growth in either China or Japan before expiration of the Waiver Order on March 26, 2023 leading into the summer season,” A4A writes. Covid-19, the group maintains, “continues to have a significant impact on airline operations and air travel”.<br/>

Investigators are probing the narrowly avoided catastrophic collision between two airliners at New York’s JFK airport Friday evening and are already conducting interviews, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. The incident involved an American Airlines 777 that improperly crossed an active runway at the busy airport. “S**t!” an air traffic controller called out over the radio, urgently directing a Delta Air Lines 737 to stop its takeoff from the same runway where the American plane rolled across its direct path. The Delta plane stopped within 1,000 feet of the American jet. NTSB spokeswoman Sarah Sulick said interviews related to the investigation are ongoing, a detail that has not yet been reported elsewhere. She provided no further details. American (AAL) spokesman Derek Walls said the airline is “conducting a full internal review and cooperating with the National Transportation Safety Board in their investigation.” The union representing American (AAL) pilots, the Allied Pilots Association, said, “We respect the process and we’re going to let that run its full course.” Another source of information investigators typically turn to when determining what happened inside the cockpit of an airliner incident is the cockpit voice recorder, one of the two so-called black boxes. Investigators will be able to listen to the radio transmissions, which have already been recorded and preserved. The conversations between crew members that are not broadcast over the radio are picked up by the CVR.<br/>

Rich travelers will have to pay more to fly if the aviation industry is to transition to greener fuels, the boss of one of the world’s biggest airports said Tuesday. Speaking on a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos hosted by CNN’s Richard Quest, Heathrow CEO John Holland-Kaye said that wealthy individuals and companies should pay extra to fly with sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) in order to bring the costs down for everyone else, particularly people in developing countries. He said that financiers and energy suppliers should invest in SAF production, including in emerging markets. “But as individuals and companies we need to be paying the premium for sustainable aviation fuels so that we can get the cost of it down so that the mass market and developing countries don’t have to pay for the energy transition. The wealthy people in this room and wealthy nations should be funding the energy transition in aviation to help support developing countries,” he added. Holland-Kaye said the solution to sustainable aviation was not to fly less, which was not necessarily an option outside Northern Europe, but to use cleaner sources of energy to travel.<br/>

The official who runs Europe’s air transport policy admits Brussels is powerless to stop Chinese airlines gaining a competitive edge by overflying Russia after Beijing opened up to international flights for the first time in three years. European airlines serving Asia have avoided Russian airspace since the EU imposed sanctions following the invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. However, Beijing did not follow suit, and its airlines can cut flight times to Europe by routing over its neighbour’s extensive territory. With China closed to the outside world, this was not a problem. However, following Beijing’s recent abandoning of its so-called zero-Covid regime, it has created an uneven playing field, something IATA DG Willie Walsh and others highlight. However, Henrik Hololei, the European Commission’s director general for transport and mobility says Chinese carriers are not breaching aviation regulations by overflying Russia. “There are no measures that can be applied,” he admitted during a one-to-one discussion with Walsh at the Airline Economics Growth Frontiers conference in Dublin on 16 January. Walsh and Hololei crossed swords over Europe’s decision to urge members to require Covid-19 checks for passengers arriving from China amid a rapid rise in infections there. “We immediately reverted to PCR testing after China opened, yet as we have seen, it brings little or no benefit,” says Walsh. Hololei says the commission took advice from health experts and its recommendations were an attempt at a compromise. “Our aim was to try and converge with a common European approach rather than a patchwork,” he said. “Several member states wanted an even stricter policy. It could have been much worse, but we wanted to limit disruption.” <br/>

France’s DGAC aviation regulator has asked airlines to cancel around one in five flights to and from Paris’ Orly airport on Thursday in anticipation of planned nationwide strikes in protest against government pensions reform, a spokesperson told Reuters on Tuesday. The airport south of Paris, the city’s second-largest, at this stage is the only one in the country where the strikes could lead to disruptions, the spokesperson added.<br/>

Istanbul airport handled 64.5m passengers in 2022, making it the busiest in Europe last year, while airports elsewhere in the region have reported doubling or tripling of passenger figures. Figures released by Turkey’s state airports authority show more than three-quarters of Istanbul airport’s passenger volumes were generated on international routes in 2022, a year in which tourism drove a strong recovery. The 64.5m-passenger figure is 6% shy of the 68.7 million passengers who travelled through Istanbul’s main gateway in 2019 – a figure comprising combined traffic for Istanbul airport and the city’s Ataturk airport, which Istanbul replaced during a phased period in 2019. Passenger volumes at Istanbul airport in 2022 jumped 73% above 2021 levels. Two other Turkish airports recovered to handle more than 30m passengers last year; Antalya at just over 31m and Istanbul’s Sabiha Gokcen airport, at slightly less than 31m passengers. Full-year passenger figures for 2022 so far released by major European airports underline the recovery among the region’s bigger hubs as Covid-19 travel restrictions gradually eased. London Heathrow airport more than trebled passenger numbers year-on-year in 2022, handling almost 62m travellers. Almost a quarter of Heathrow’s passenger volumes were generated from the key transatlantic market. Still, Heathrow’s passenger traffic remains almost a quarter down on the nearly 81m passengers who travelled via the airport before the pandemic in 2019. <br/>

China’s weeklong Chinese New Year holiday, which kicks off on Sunday, will be a key test for its aviation sector. As millions of people travel home to be with their families – the first proper reunions since Covid-19 – the question is whether the same chaos seen at airports in other countries as they reopened will be replicated. Endless queues, a lack of check-in staff and insufficient luggage handlers were common complaints worldwide once virus restrictions were lifted and people took to the skies. While there’s little evidence yet of that happening in China, mayhem could still ensue as big-city office workers – more likely to fly than catch a train – pack their bags. “As North America and Europe opened up, passengers experienced significant disruptions as a consequence of resource constraints – a shortage of staff at airlines, customs, immigration and security,” said Mr Rob Morris, the global head of consultancy at Ascend by Cirium. “There’s a risk China might see the same if demand rebounds rapidly.” Certainly the desire to travel is there. Flight bookings are up 15 per cent this Chinese New Year versus last, according to Trip.com, while scheduled inbound flights for the first quarter have increased almost 150 per cent compared with the first quarter of 2022, data from aviation analytics company Cirium show. And with nations from South Korea to Australia imposing restrictions on visitors from China, many expect international travel to rebound more slowly, putting additional strain on domestic networks. “The willingness to travel has started to rebound strongly among Chinese who have recovered from Covid but it takes time for that to be reflected in outbound travel routes,” UBS Securities’ head of China leisure and transport research Chen Xin said. “Domestic travel destinations are expected to be the biggest beneficiaries during the upcoming Chinese New Year.”<br/>

Beijing Daxing International Airport in China has restarted operating outbound overseas flight services after a pause of around three years due to Covid-19 pandemic restrictions. The resumption of international services comes after the Chinese Government decided to ease Covid-19 curbs by downgrading it from Class A to Class B, and lifting of all quarantine measures for overseas passengers coming to China from 8 January, Global Times reported. Beijing Daxing International Airport Customs deputy director Zhao Zhao was quoted by the publication as saying: “After receiving the flight resumption plan, we continued to improve the customs operation process from the aspects of aircraft scheduling, passenger and baggage flow to make a full preparation.” The first flight to take off was China Southern Airlines, which was bound for Hong Kong with 101 passengers onboard, the publication stated. In March 2020, all flights bound for Beijing Daxing Airport were re-routed to Beijing Capital International Airport due to the pandemic.<br/>

South Korea's air traffic rose 16 percent in 2022 from a year earlier on unleashed pent-up demand for travel amid eased COVID-19 virus curbs, the transport ministry said Wednesday. Airlines, domestic and foreign, made a total of 539,788 flights over South Korea last year, up from 465,469 flights a year ago, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said in a statement. The ministry said the 2022 number of flights still stood at 65% of the pre-pandemic levels. Air traffic in the country had gradually increased in recent years from around 739,000 in 2016 to 842,000 in 2019 before plunging to around 421,000 in 2020 due to the pandemic. Late last year, travel demand began to recover, helped by eased travel restrictions in some countries. In October, South Korea removed a COVID-19 polymerase chain reaction test requirement for inbound travelers on the first day of their arrival. Japan lifted the ban on the number of inbound passengers and resumed visa-free travel for visitors from specific countries, including South Korea, on Oct. 11. As a result, the number of international flights jumped 36% on-year to 276,356 last year, while that of domestic flights rose 0.4% to 263,432 during the same period, the statement said. Incheon International Airport was the busiest airport in South Korea last year with an average of 521 flights a day, followed by Jeju International Airport with 486 flights and Gimpo International Airport with 440 flights, it said. <br/>

Singapore's international arrivals beat forecasts in 2022, paving the way for its tourism sector to recover to pre-pandemic levels by 2024, its tourism authority said on Tuesday. The city-state saw 6.3m visitors last year, exceeding the Singapore Tourism Board's (STB) forecast of between 4 to 6m, while revenue from their spending was estimated to reach S$13.8b to S$14.3b ($10.45-10.82b). STB's Director of Communications Terence Voon said these numbers were achieved even though Singapore had quarantine measures in the first quarter of 2022, reflecting that there is "strong pent-up demand" to visit Singapore. But factors such as flight capacity and any renewed border restrictions could moderate tourism recovery, said STB's CE, Keith Tan. Tourism contributes about 4% to Singapore's annual gross domestic product, according to the STB. In 2019, the regional travel hub saw a record 19.1m visitors and S$27.7b in revenue. Following the announcement of reopening of Chinese borders, the Southeast Asian country is expecting 12 to 14m arrivals and up to S$21b in revenue in 2023. There were 3.6m visitors from China in 2019, making it the largest contributor to Singapore's tourism before the pandemic. But while it had strict travel restrictions in place, China was overtaken by Indonesia, India, Malaysia, Australia and the Philippines.<br/>

The world's two largest planemakers defended themselves on Tuesday following criticism over delivery delays, with a Boeing executive saying increasing production after COVID-19 lockdowns was "not as easy as an on/off switch." Aircraft leasing firms have used a major industry conference to hammer manufacturers over delays. Air Lease executive chairman Steven Udvar-Hazy said they had "grossly misjudged" output, while one of Airbus' largest customers, AerCap (AER.N), called the European firm's production targets "very ambitious".<br/>Mark Pearman-Wright, head of leasing and investor marketing at Airbus, said ramping up production had been more difficult than expected but that a range of unpredictable issues had not changed its route to producing 65 narrow-body jets a month in 2024 and 75 aircraft in 2025. "We've just come out of an unprecedented recession and it's followed by an unprecedented recovery, followed by a war, in addition to a lockdown of China, which has also had an impact on the supply chain," Pearman-Wright told the Airline Economics conference in Dublin. "To keep it simple, c'est compliqué (it's complicated)." To help remove the bottlenecks, Airbus has placed over 100 procurement specialists into its indirect suppliers to help them achieve the rates in the supply chain that the jetmaker requires to ramp up production, Pearman-Wright added. Boeing has also sent some of its own employees to work with suppliers to help stabilise the supply chain, Vice president for commercial marketing Darren Hulst said, adding this was the key to ultimately ramping up production and hitting its targets.<br/>

Canadian business jet maker Bombardier met its revenue and delivery targets for 2022, handing over 123 aircraft and generating about $6.9 billion in revenue last year. Detailing its performance in a preliminary financial report released on 17 January, Bombardier also grew its backlog by $1.4b in 2022, to $13.6b, up from $12.2b a year earlier. The figures show Bombardier met at least some targets executives set in August. At that time, they predicted the firm would deliver more than 120 aircraft and generate over $6.5b in full-year revenue. Aircraft manufacturers globally struggled in 2022 to hike production amid supply chain disruption and shortages of skilled workers. But Bombardier appears to have managed better than most. “Despite all the challenges that the supply chain is offering, we’ve been extremely proactive for the last two years and a half… managing the situation and we are looking forward with that confidence in terms of our deliveries,” chief executive Eric Martel said in November 2022. Martel indicated that Bombardier plans to expand its production by 15-20% this year. Bombardier will disclose its full 2022 financial results on 9 February.<br/>

The head of Carlyle Aviation Partners said that aircraft leasing firms will be likely to further increase lease rates as the supply of aircraft becomes more scarce throughout 2023, saying prices have not been high enough in recent years. “As the balance changes and it’s more a scarcity environment, there’s going to be a propensity for lessors to take the opportunity to increase lease rates and to charge more,” said Robert Korn, whose firm was ranked as the 8th biggest lessor in publisher Airfinance Journal’s 2022 rankings. “So we’re starting to see rates rise, and I don’t think they’ve risen as far as they will rise and I don’t think they’ve caught up with interest rates yet either.” <br/>

A Covid-era invention that protects plane passengers from the virus with a curtain of fast-flowing air is proving redundant, underscoring how little travellers care about the risk of infection in the rush back to the skies. Washington-based Pexco Aerospace has spent the pandemic designing and manufacturing a device that clips onto air vents inside the aircraft. The gadget – called Airshield – forces air down to the cabin floor at twice the normal speed and creates an invisible barrier between each passenger. The risk of cross-contamination from a nearby cough or sneeze, Pexco says, is reduced by more than 70%. The company’s enterprising add-on might have made commercial sense for airlines in the early days of the crisis, when many carriers blocked out middle seats to create an expensive buffer against Covid-19. But almost three years on, Airshield has instead come to highlight the staggering pace of aviation’s recovery from a state of near-collapse. Airlines are now struggling to meet demand from a public that cares more about taking overdue vacations than possibly catching Covid-19. From American Airlines Group to Qantas Airways in Australia, carriers are hauling in bumper profits and have little incentive to spend money on extra layers of health protection. “If the pandemic hit tomorrow for the first time, this would be a wildly successful solution,” Jon Page, president at Pexco Aerospace, said in a video interview, referring to Airshield. “Maybe we have missed the boat. You could argue that.” It would cost an airline about US$60,000 to fit out a single-aisle plane with the device, Page said.<br/>