general

After three years of largely self-imposed isolation because of Covid‑19, China is finally reopening. But US airlines are not lining up to reinstate the once-abundant services between the world’s two largest economies. In pre-pandemic 2019, direct flights between the United States and China by carriers from both countries averaged 340 per week. Today there are a maximum of just two dozen weekly. The biggest three US airlines – American, Delta and United – will keep flying at reduced pandemic-era levels, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified speaking about private discussions. But it is not because of weak demand. Rather, it is a dispute over Russian airspace restrictions that apply to about three dozen countries, including the US, but not to China. The quiet stand-off comes against the backdrop of an overall deterioration in relations between Beijing and Washington, clouding prospects for a quick diplomatic resolution. Meanwhile, Japan’s ANA, British Airways and Emirates Airlines are among carriers that have restarted, or announced plans to resume, daily flights to Chinese cities including Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai. Korean Air’s China service has reached pre-pandemic levels, growing from 13 weekly flights to 84 in April, with plans to expand to 99 in May, the airline said. Air France is asking the French government to limit Chinese airlines’ access to the country, saying they enjoy an unfair advantage because they can fly over Russian airspace. But it is also asking to more than double its own China-bound flights, to 14 a week.<br/>

Last August, Oleg Patsulya, a Russian citizen living near Miami, emailed a Russian airline that had been cut off from Western technology and materials with a tempting offer. He could help circumvent the global sanctions imposed on Rossiya Airlines after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by shuffling the aircraft parts and electronics that it so desperately needed through a network of companies based in Florida, Turkey and Russia. “In light of the sanctions imposed against the Russian Federation, we have been successfully solving challenges at hand,” Patsulya wrote, according to a criminal complaint filed Friday with the US District Court in Arizona. Patsulya and his business partner were arrested Thursday on charges of violating U.S. export controls and international money laundering in a case that illustrates the global networks that are trying to help Russia bypass the most expansive technological controls in history. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States has acted in partnership with nearly 40 other governments to impose sanctions on Russia, including limits on Moscow’s access to weapons, computer chips, aircraft parts and other products needed to fuel its economy and its war. The sanctions also applied to Russian airlines including Aeroflot, its subsidiary Rossiya and others. But despite these far-reaching sanctions, thousands of shipments of aircraft parts were successfully sent into Russia last year, according to a trove of Russian customs data obtained by The New York Times. The data, which was compiled and analyzed by Import Genius, a US-based trade data aggregator, shows that tens of millions of dollars of aircraft parts were sent to Russian airlines explicitly facing sanctions by the Biden administration, including to Rossiya Airlines, Aeroflot, Ural Airlines, S7 Airlines, Utair Aviation and Pobeda Airlines. Those shipments were made possible by illicit networks like Patsulya’s, which have sprung up to try to bypass the restrictions by shuffling goods through a series of straw buyers, often in the Middle East and Asia.<br/>

Inspections for cracks in the vicinity of Airbus A380 wing spars must take into account the amount of time the aircraft has been parked in storage, safety regulators have instructed. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency has updated its criteria for determining inspection intervals for the affected areas – specifically flanges between certain ribs on the front and rear spars. This issue dates back to 2019, when it initially applied to older A380 airframes. EASA subsequently expanded the inspection regime to all A380s, and reduced the time between inspections. The air transport crisis prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in several carriers withdrawing A380s from service and placing them in storage. But capacity demands have spurred a number of operators to return the double-deck type to service. “Prompted by analysis of further inspection results, it was determined that the threshold for [spar] inspection must depend on more criteria than only the wing age,” says EASA. “The severity of [outer rear spar] findings showed a relationship with the amount of time an [aircraft] spends on ground [parked or stored] in severe environmental conditions.” EASA says this consideration means there is a need for operators to take factored time on ground into consideration, and it has updated an airworthiness directive for the A380 wing checks, instructing operators to calculate this time-on-ground and, accordingly, determine compliance times for inspection.<br/>

A luxury presidential plane which Mexico had been trying to offload for more than four years has finally arrived in its new home - Tajikistan. President López Obrador made the sale of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner one of his campaign promises, calling it a symbol of previous governments' excesses. But the specially-outfitted plane proved hard to shift and an attempt to raffle it off failed. It was finally sold to the Tajik government for $92m. The jet took off from California, where it had been in storage, and arrived in the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, early on Monday. The plane was originally purchased in 2012 by the president at the time, Felipe Calderón, for $218m. It was then used by Calderón's successor, Enrique Peña Nieto. López Obrador vowed to never set foot in it. He has been using commercial flights since he took office.<br/>

Flights between Bahrain and Qatar will resume as of May 25, Bahrain News Agency reported on Monday. The resumption of flights between Bahrain and Qatar “comes within the framework of the brotherly relations between the two brotherly countries and peoples, and in a manner that achieves” their common aspirations,” BNA said.<br/>

China’s air passenger numbers soared 537.9% in April from a year earlier, the aviation regulator said on Tuesday. A total of 50.3m air passenger trips were recorded last month, the Civil Aviation Administration told a news briefing.<br/>

Honeywell International Inc. and Summit Agricultural Group are partnering to build the world’s largest plant making ethanol-based aviation fuel — a project that’s likely to become a $1b facility and expected to open in 2025. The plant will eventually produce enough jet fuel to power thousands of flights per year, according to Summit Agricultural, run by entrepreneur Bruce Rastetter. The facility will be located in the US Gulf Coast and will utilize Honeywell’s technology to transform ethanol into sustainable aviation fuel, known as SAF, the companies said Monday. The global aviation market demands more than 100b gallons of jet fuel annually, with Summit estimating that figure will double in the next 20 years. Meanwhile, airlines across the globe are coming under increasing pressure to decrease their carbon emissions. The Biden Administration has announced a goal for SAF to meet 100% of aviation fuel demand by 2050. Annual production in the US was 15m gallons in 2022. Summit said it’s in talks about providing SAF supplies to major airlines and freight companies. Alden, Iowa-based Summit has the largest corn-based ethanol plant in Brazil and is planning to use biofuel from that facility to feed the US SAF factory, along with supplies from US Midwest plants that have signed on to its carbon pipeline project. The project is a “natural extension” for the partner plants in the US that are using the other arm of the company, Summit Carbon Solutions, to de-carbonize the ethanol production, said Summit Ag Investors President Justin Kirchhoff. The SAF plant will be in a unique position given its location in the US Gulf to utilize a variety of ethanol feedstocks from different locations. Alternative biofuels that are made from soybeans or fats have seen tighter feedstock supplies. <br/>

Travellers would be able to fly from Britain to Australia in less than two hours within the next decade by travelling through space, new research from a major aviation body suggests. The UK’s Civil Aviation Authority - which overseas and regulates aviation safety - funded a new medical study into the effects of suborbital space flights, where passengers would be briefly sent into space before descending to land at their destination. Suborbital flights, such as those offered by Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, or and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin companies, currently cost more than $650,000 a seat. While so-called “A to B flights” differ from experimental space tourism, industry and regulators have forecast both forms of travel could become readily accessible by the mid-2030s. A flight would involve a high G-force rocket launch to an altitude of up to 100km, where the craft would reach space but not have the required speed to stay in the Earth’s orbit. The method of travel would mean journeys last only a fraction of the time taken by the current methods of aviation, with the flight time between the UK capital and Sydney usually around 22 hours or 19 hours direct from Perth or Darwin. In 1985, a British Airways Concorde flight set a record for the London to Sydney leg in just 17 hours, 3 minutes and 45 seconds - with refuelling stops in Bahrain, Colombo and Perth.<br/>