Congressional investigators said in a report Friday that an increase in flight cancellations as travel recovered from the pandemic was due mostly to factors that airlines controlled, including cancellations for maintenance issues or lack of a crew. The Government Accountability Office also said airlines are taking longer to recover from disruptions such as storms. Surges in cancellations in late 2021 and early 2022 lasted longer than they did before the pandemic, the GAO said. Much of the increase in airline-caused cancellations has occurred at budget airlines, but the largest carriers have also made more unforced errors, according to government data. Airlines have clashed with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg over blame for high rates of canceled and delayed flights in the past two years. Airlines argue that the government is at fault for not having enough air traffic controllers, while Buttigieg has blamed the carriers. The GAO report was requested by Republican leaders of the House Transportation Committee. The GAO said it examined flight data from January 2018 through April 2022 to understand why travelers suffered more delays and cancellations as travel began to recover from the pandemic. The GAO said weather was the leading cause of cancellations in the two years before the pandemic, but the percentage of airline-caused cancellations began increasing in early 2021. From October through December 2021, airlines caused 60% or more of cancellations — higher that at any time in 2018 or 2019. At the time, airlines were understaffed. The airlines took $54b in taxpayer money to keep employees on the job through the pandemic, but they reduced workers anyway by paying them incentives to quit.<br/>
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A dispute over airline routes between the US and China has emerged as a further sticking point in efforts to improve relations between the countries after Joe Biden and Xi Jinping agreed stabilising ties was necessary in November. The US has offered to grant Chinese airlines the same number of weekly flights between both countries as American carriers — but only if they agree not to fly over Russia, according to six people familiar with the talks. Moscow banned US carriers from flying over the country after Washington prohibited Russian airlines from flying to the US in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Chinese airlines are not banned from Russian airspace. US carriers have 12 weekly flights to China, while Chinese airlines have eight to the US. The American carriers face higher fuel costs than their Chinese rivals whose routes over Russia to the US are much shorter. US airlines have lobbied the Biden administration not to grant China more flights because of the cost gap. The shorter route over Russia also allows Chinese carriers the advantage of flying directly to the US east coast. One Chinese embassy official said Beijing’s proposal to equalise weekly flight numbers — to give both sides 12 — was “quite reasonable”. He blamed Washington for the stalemate in the negotiations, saying China did not accept that its carriers should have to avoid flying over Russia. “The slow progress at the moment is not what we want to see. Frankly speaking, the responsibility lies with the US side,” the official said. “An issue between the US and Russia is not one between the US and China, even less should it be used as a basis for demanding the so-called ‘reciprocity’.” The Chinese diplomat added that Xi and Biden had agreed on the need for more people-to-people exchanges between the countries when the leaders met at the G20 summit in Bali in November and stressed that more flights were needed to meet that goal. But US carriers, with the support of some members of Congress, want the Biden administration to resist granting the Chinese airlines more flights.<br/>
Turkey on Saturday closed its airspace to low-cost Armenian airline FlyOne Armenia without warning, the domestic Armenpress news agency cited the carrier's board chairman as saying. "For reasons incomprehensible to us and without any visible grounds, Turkish aviation authorities cancelled the permission previously granted to the FlyOne Armenia airline to operate flights to Europe through Turkish airspace," said Aram Ananyan, FlyOne's chairman. "Turkish aviation authorities implemented the cancellation without prior notification, putting our airline and our passengers in an uncomfortable situation." FlyOne Armenia, a subsidiary of Moldovan airline FlyOne, began operations in December 2021. In February 2023, Ananyan told Armenpress that the carrier had five Airbus aircraft and offered flights to 14 destinations in eight European and Middle Eastern nations. Ankara has not had diplomatic or commercial ties with Armenia since the 1990s.<br/>
China is bracing for a record-high travel rush over the Labour Day holiday, with popular sightseeing spots selling out of tickets and some cities warning would-be visitors away as domestic tourism rebounds after Beijing ended COVID curbs. Authorities are expecting 19m trips to be made across China's vast railway network on Saturday, the first day of the five-day holiday, which would be the highest number of rail trips made in a single day in the country's history. It compares to 4.4m rail trips on May 1 last year, when China locked down several cities including Shanghai to battle the spread of the virus, and the last peak of 18.8m on the same day in 2021. Over the 40-day Lunar New Year travel period in January-February this year, 348 trips were made in total, or about 8.7m trips a day on average, according to the National Railway Administration. The May holiday is far shorter than the Lunar New Year and October Golden Week holidays but traditionally still is one of China's busiest travel seasons as spring moves into summer. This year, the holiday is crucial for the tourism industry as well as the wider Chinese economy as the country strives to recover from years of virus disruptions. China's aviation authority said it expects air passenger trips to reach a total of 9m over the five days. <br/>
A power outage hit a Philippine international airport on Monday and the airport operator said flight delays are expected. “Standby power is now supplying electricity to critical facilities enabling computer systems of airlines and immigration to function partially and enable processing of both inbound and outbound passengers,” Manila International Airport Authority said in a statement. The outage, which began at 1:05 am local time, hit Terminal 3 of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport which services both international and domestic flights.<br/>
Some FAA engineers recommended grounding the Boeing 737 MAX in March 2019 after a second fatal crash and before the agency took action, a report released Friday said. The Transportation Department's Office of Inspector General said in a report that its review of emails and interviews of FAA officials revealed individual engineers recommended "grounding the airplane while the accident was being investigated based on what they perceived as similarities" between two fatal Boeing 737 MAX crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia. "Yet agency officials at headquarters and the Seattle (Aircraft Certification Office) opted not to do so." The FAA ultimately grounded the MAX on March 13, 2019 and lifted the flight prohibition order in November 2020 after Boeing made a series of software upgrades and training changes. The crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia led to a 20-month grounding for the best-selling plane, costing Boeing more than $20 billion and prompting lawmakers to pass sweeping legislation reforming airplane certification. Boeing declined comment. The report FAA officials "expressed frustration that foreign civil aviation authorities were grounding the aircraft before they had data that linked the two accidents." The report said FAA has not updated the underlying order and related guidance for its post-event risk assessment processes in over a decade and lacks "quantifiable human factors data, such as pilot reactions to non-normal situations." It also said FAA engineers "are not all following or receiving the same guidance or training." It made seven recommendations for improvements for risk assessments and other issues.<br/>
Investment company GenZero, which is wholly owned by Singapore's Temasek, is looking to developments in green energy such as sustainable aviation fuels for its potential bets, as demand surges for cleaner ways to drive economies in Asia and beyond in the face of climate change. In an interview with Nikkei Asia, GenZero CEO Frederick Teo highlighted sustainable aviation fuels and hydrogen power as promising sectors for growth. "When it comes to aviation, maritime, I think the next generation of biofuels -- advanced biofuels like sustainable aviation fuels and all that, would be quite important," said the head of the company, founded last year by state investor Temasek. "Some of these things already exist, but to be able to bring the cost curves down to an extent to which [they] can be deployed more readily, I think it's going to make a big difference," Teo continued. GenZero is an advocate of greener energy sources in flying. It last year backed a program involving the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore and Singapore Airlines, which also has Temasek as a major shareholder, to supply sustainable aviation fuel to the carrier's jets. Under the program, 1,000 tonnes of the product will be provided by Finnish biofuel producer Neste and blended with refined jet fuel at American oil major ExxonMobil's facilities in Singapore. According to GenZero, this is expected to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 2,500 tonnes for the amount of Neste's product earmarked for the program. Neste makes sustainable aviation fuel from renewable waste and residue raw materials such as used cooking oil and animal fat waste. "Some of these processes can actually take municipal waste and convert it into fuel," said Teo. "This particular use of the feedstock means that you are not throwing trash, say, in particular countries, into open landfills that then create methane emissions, and therefore the carbon abatement is very significant."<br/>
The US Army on Friday ordered its aviation units to pause operations for one day next month to review safety procedures and training after two recent helicopter crashes killed 12 soldiers. The move will ground all Army aviators, except those participating in critical missions, until they complete the required training, the Army said in a statement. Three US Army pilots were killed in Alaska on Thursday when two Apache helicopters collided. Last month, nine soldiers were killed in a crash of two Black Hawk helicopters during a training mission over Kentucky.<br/>