Air Serbia will restore operations to Tel Aviv and the Middle East this March following a hiatus of just over three years. The Serbian carrier has scheduled a three weekly service between Belgrade and Israel’s largest city starting April 8. Flights will operate each Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. The carrier last maintained flights to Tel Aviv until the coronavirus outbreak which halted international travel in March 2020. Since then, the carrier has also been absent from the Middle East region. Further flight details for the Tel Aviv service can be found here. Tel Aviv becomes the 22nd destination Air Serbia will inaugurate this year.<br/>
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UK start-up Hans Airways is set to return its only aircraft, an Airbus A330-200, and open talks with potential new investors, after launch hopes were hit by delays in securing its air operator’s certificate. Birmingham-based Hans Airways has been working on a plan to launch long-haul flights between the UK and India. It took its first aircraft, an ex-Air Europa A330-200, in August 2022 and had originally hoped to launch flights that year. In November it said it had completed a fresh round of financing as it bid to secure its AOC and launch operations. However its difficulties securing an AOC have persisted. ”Fulfilling the rightly-stringent financial criteria required by the UK [Civil Aviation Authority] to commence scheduled operations continues to hinder our launch plans,” the carrier says. ”This is despite satisfying all technical aspects of long-haul airline operations and maintaining a solvent start up business since our inception in 2019. ”In light of this we are pursuing a number of options. This includes the relinquishing of our first aircraft and stepped-up dialogue with prospective new investors and lessors. We maintain close and cordial dialogue with the CAA.” The carrier has not disclosed a potential launch timeframe.<br/>
Middle Eastern carrier Emirates is preparing for the introduction of its Airbus A350 and Boeing 777X fleets with a new pilot-training facility in Dubai. The facility, to be sited next to its current training centre, is scheduled to open in March next year. It will have six full-flight simulator bays for the new aircraft types. Emirates has 50 A350-900s on order and expects to start training pilots on the twinjet in June 2024. The carrier also has orders for 115 777X jets.Emirates says the centre, comprising a $135 million investment, will be able to provide over 50% additional pilot-training capacity to the airline. Student pilots will be able to configure the cockpit prior to training sessions and upload this data to the simulator. “This innovative, first-of-its-kind concept is designed to shorten the trainee’s preparatory time inside the simulator, help them maintain focus and take full advantage of the training duration,” says the carrier. Emirates Group chief Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum says the facility will be equipped with solar power systems to reduce energy consumption.<br/>
Kazakhstan’s Air Astana posted its highest after-tax profit of $78.4m in 2022 on record passenger and revenue figures. CE Peter Foster had last month told FlightGlobal that the group was set to post the strong results after what he termed a “spectacularly successful” 2022. Such an outcome seemed an unlikely when flights were hit in January 2022 by political unrest in Almaty and when air services in the region where further disrupted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the following month. “Revenue loss caused by the closure of routes to, from and over Russia was more than compensated for by increased capacity deployment to Europe, Asia, India, and the Caucasus,” says Foster. Air Astana posted group revenues of just over $1b in 2022, a year in which passenger numbers jumped to 7.35m. That surpassed the $900m revenues the group generated in pre-pandemic 2019, while passenger levels outstripped the 6.6m the Kazakh group flew in 2021. Much of the traffic growth has been led by low-cost unit FlyArystan – which only launched four years ago. While the group has not provided a breakdown of passenger numbers between network carrier Air Astana and its budget unit, Foster previously indicated the latter was likely to carry more passengers in 2022. “FlyArystan has grown by 366% since its inaugural year of 2019,” says Foster today. “It has a great future, as this region probably has the fastest growing low-cost air travel market in the world today.”<br/>
Spring Airlines’ chairman has acknowledged that recovery will be a long-drawn process, given the severe impact the coronavirus pandemic has wrought on the Chinese airline sector. Still, Wang Yu, who was speaking in an interview with Chinese state-owned broadcaster CGTN, says the low-cost operator is seeing “obvious” positive signs of a rebound since Beijing eased much of its ‘zero-Covid’ restrictions in January. The airline is currently operating 14,000 flights in a day, a four-fold jump from three months ago, when it was flying only about 3,000 daily flights – nearly all of them domestic flights because at that time China’s borders remained shut. Wang says the privately-owned Spring has recovered about 88% of pre-pandemic 2019 levels, noting that capacity and traffic “even surpassed” 2019 levels. His comments echo sentiments among other Chinese carriers, whose January traffic results show a rebound in travel demand following the abrupt easing of restrictions. Wang adds that the airline’s international capacity has recovered to only around 24% pre-pandemic levels. He told CGTN that the industry “was hit really hard” by the pandemic financially, stressing that the “recovery process will be slow”. “But we have all types of support…those difficulties will be easier to overcome,” adds Wang. <br/>