Italy state-owned carrier ITA Airways approved a business plan shared with Deutsche Lufthansa AG, a further step toward selling a minority stake to the German airline. The plan envisages the development of ITA Airways’ fleet, network and strategic goals and it has been discussed by Italy’s Finance Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti, ITA Chairman Antonino Turicchi and Lufthansa’s CEO Carsten Spohr in a meeting in Rome on Thursday. The plan hasn’t been publicly disclosed yet. “Further progress has been made in the direction of the industrial partnership between the two carriers,” the Finance Ministry said in a separate note. Lufthansa aims to buy a minority stake in the successor of Italy’s failed flag carrier Alitalia, strengthening its position in the European airline market. The German carrier is seeking to buy as much as 40% of ITA, with the two parties still negotiating over its value. Daily Corriere della Sera reported that the stake could be worth between E200m and E250m. ITA Airways lost E486m in 2022, according to a statement. <br/>
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Greece’s Aegean Airlines plans to establish the country’s first advanced flight training centre through a partnership with Canada’s CAE, a top provider of flight simulators for pilot training. The carrier said on 30 March said the facility will have capacity for seven full-flight simulators and be “the most advanced flight training hub in southeast Europe powered by green energy”. The Aegean CAE Flight Training Centre will be part of the airline’s 85,000 sq m (915,000 sq ft) technical base at Athens International airport and is expected to begin pilot and cabin crew training by the end of this year. The facility will initially operate four full-flight simulators – two Airbus A320neos, one Boeing 737NG and one ATR 72-600 – as well as cabin crew training equipment. “At full capacity, the centre will be able to train up to 3,500 pilots and many more cabin crew annually,” Aegean says. Part of Aegean’s new E140m “aviation ecosystem” in Athens which includes the country’s first maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) facility, the training centre represents a significant investment in Greece’s aviation industry, the companies say. Dimitris Gerogiannis, Aegean’s CE, says his airline’s new partnership with CAE will “establish the first aviation ecosystem for flight training and technical support services in Greece”. “We look forward to a successful joint venture with Aegean and to seeing the aviation industry flourish in Greece and the entire region,” adds Nick Leontidis, CAE’s president of civil aviation. The airline’s investments are expected to create 500 new highly skilled jobs, Aegean says. Solar energy produced by 35,000 sq m of photovoltaic panels embedded in Aegean’s “green” hangar will power the training centre. The Athens-based airline operates a fleet of 76 narrowbody Airbus aircraft, which it is in the process of renewing with A320neos and A321neos. Last year, CAE launched a new pilot training centre in Sydney through a partnership with Qantas. <br/>
Air India, until recently tied to an antiquated manual pricing system when setting airfares, is shifting to algorithm-based software long used by rivals to help it squeeze out more revenue from each flight. In another sign of the formerly government-owned carrier's whirlwind transformation under its new owner Tata Group, Air India is testing ChatGPT, OpenAI's popular chatbot, to replace paper-based practices. The push to modernise underscores the decay left by years of under-investment as Air India looks to shed decades-old bureaucratic processes and recapture customers from Dubai's Emirates and powerful domestic rival IndiGo. "Frankly the system is almost so bad it's good," CEO Campbell Wilson told Indian airline executives last week, adding that this offered the chance to start from scratch rather than "jury-rig" existing architecture. Air India is not only reworking every aspect of operations - from systems to supply chains - but integrating four Tata-related airlines, with Air India due to merge with Vistara while low-cost Air India Express and AirAsia India also converge. Some areas, such as technology, allow for a clean-sheet approach, the 52-year-old New Zealander said, which is why he is putting artificial intelligence (AI) and other tools at the centre of Air India's reboot. Modern "revenue management" software aims to stay one step ahead of demand, continuously anticipating where people want to go and how much each individual flyer is prepared to pay, rather than the old method of having one fare for each block of seats. The result is higher revenue per flight, making it low-hanging fruit in the company's transformation.<br/>
China's flagship carrier Air China posted record annual losses of 38.6b yuan ($5.61b) on Thursday as the country's now-abandoned zero-COVID policy led to a plunge in demand. Shanghai-based China Eastern Airlines on Thursday said it had lost a record 37.4b yuan in 2022, wider than its 2021 loss of 12.2b yuan. Analysts forecast a return to profit for China's leading airlines this year now that restrictions have eased. Domestic flight numbers have exceeded 2019 levels since the middle of this month, according to data firm Flight Master, while international flight numbers to and from China were at about 30% of pre-pandemic levels this week, up from around 10% at the start of the year. China Southern Airlines Tuesday reported a record annual loss of 32.7b yuan, wider than the 12.1b yuan loss in 2021. But the Guangzhou-based airline's management team afterwards told analysts it expected passenger demand to fully recover to pre-pandemic levels in the domestic market by May and international capacity to reach 40% of 2019 levels by the peak summer season, Daiwa analyst Kelvin Lau said in a note to clients. The record 38.6b yuan loss for 2022 of Beijing-based Air China more than doubled from the loss of 16.6b yuan in 2021, when there were fewer COVID-related lockdowns.<br/>