Canada’s second airline, WestJet, plans to go it alone when it comes to US flights and not renew its plans for a transborder joint venture with Delta Air Lines. “We are happy with what we are doing, and we haven’t decided to take any decision on potentially refiling a joint venture,” WestJet CEO Alexis von Hoensbroech told Airline Weekly in an interview. “We are happy with what we have, and [will] take it from there.” That’s a break from past WestJet management teams that had expressed plans to resubmit an application for antitrust immunity with Delta on U.S.-Canada flights. The airlines dropped their initial plans for a joint venture in November 2020 after the U.S. Department of Transportation made divesting eight slot pairs at New York’s LaGuardia airport — the total held by WestJet — a condition to approval. In their response, the airlines called the condition “onerous” in part because it provided no guarantee that the divested slots would be used to expand competition on LaGuardia-Canada routes. WestJet’s decision not to get closer to Delta comes even as its main competitor, Air Canada, has forged closer ties with United. Air Canada and United implemented a joint venture late last year that the former’s CFO Amos Kazzaz said in March was already “surpassing expectations.” The two Star Alliance carriers are able to do everything WestJet and Delta cannot under their codeshare, including “the ability to price together, manage inventory and so forth” on US-Canada routes, as Kazzaz put it. WestJet and Delta’s lack of a joint venture puts them at a competitive disadvantage to Air Canada and United. Without antitrust immunity, they can only codeshare on U.S.-Canada flights and offer things like reciprocal loyalty benefits.<br/>
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The US NTSB has determined that water leaking from lavatories formed ice that jammed the controls of a Delta Air Lines Boeing 767 last July. “The water likely froze on one or more of the components which led to the pilots’ limited control of the ailerons,” says the NTSB in a final report published on 20 April. The incident involved a Delta 767-300 (registration N181DN) operating flight 211 from Prague to New York’s John F Kennedy International airport on 7 July 2022. While airborne, flight attendants told the pilots that water was leaking from the jet’s two mid-cabin lavatories. Pilots traced the leaks to a lavatory toilet and a “filter canister under the sink”. The crew stopped the leaks by shutting off the water supply. Shortly later, the pilots received caution messages in the cockpit. In response, the first officer disengaged the jet’s autopilot and tried to turn the aircraft manually. “However, he was unable to move his control wheel to the left more than a couple of degrees of deflection and was thus unable to input the needed correction,” says the NTSB’s report. The pilots responded by completing a “jammed or restricted flight controls” procedure and communicated with Delta’s maintenance controllers. “It was determined that frozen water was a suspected cause,” says the report. The pilots therefore began descending the jet to 9,000ft, where the air temperature was predicted to be warmer. “As the airplane descended through 12,000ft, a minor ‘jolt’ was felt by the flight crew. After this, the control wheel operated normally, and the flight continued to and landed safely at JFK,” the NTSB says. <br/>