An 11-year-old boy has died after he lost consciousness on a flight heading to New York after taking off from Istanbul. The Turkish Airlines flight made an emergency landing in Budapest, Hungary, where medics were unable to save the child’s life according to the MTI news agency. The agency reported that the Airport Medical Service responded after flight TK003 made the emergency landing on Sunday, but the child’s life couldn’t be saved. The flight took off at 8.56am local time in Turkey, heading to JFK airport in New York. It was quickly diverted after the boy became unconscious, officials at Budapest International Airport said, according to the New York Post. The emergency landing took place at about 10.30am, with an ambulance ready to transport the boy and his family to a hospital. “Airport Medical Service (AMS), the medical service operating at Ferenc Liszt International Airport, was alerted to the aircraft and continued to resuscitate the child,” an airport spokesperson said, according to the Post. “Despite the rapid and professional intervention, unfortunately, his life could not be saved. The aircraft continued its journey to its original destination.” The identity of the child and the cause of death remains unclear.<br/>
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South African Airways CE John Lamola believes that the Star Alliance carrier emerging profitably from its first full year of operations since resuming flights almost two years ago underlines it is in good shape to expand. SAA entered a formal business restructuring process in late 2019 amid mounting financial challenges. This process, together with ongoing travel restrictions during Covid-19, meant SAA only resumed flights in September 2021 – and did so at a much smaller scale. “We are rebuilding South African Airways and rebuilding it on a different platform altogether as a resized and repositioned airline,” Lamola tells FlightGlobal during an interview at the IATA AGM in Istanbul.<br/>“We have had a very successful year,” he adds. ”We have just closed the financial year [March 2023] which is historic, in the sense that after a long time we posted a profit, an operating profit and a net profit, both as an airline and with our two subsidiaries [catering and maintenance]. ”What drove it is the fundamental that South African Airways has come from business rescue, so not only is the balance sheet cleaner, but we have been resized. We have slashed our overheads and we have maximised the utilization of our aircraft,” he explains. Lamola also points to an innovative and flexible approach, for example noting that negotiations with lessors to retain three of its aircraft for three months during the Southern Hemisphere winter also helped lift revenues during peak season. ”One of the secrets of our success is we chose very carefully the routes we knew would be profitable,” Lamola explains, contrasting that with some of the “political” decisions of the past. ”We choose routes out of commercial considerations.” That approach is about to see the restoration of long-haul flights, starting with Perth and Sao Paulo. This fits with SAA’s mandate to fly long-haul. ”Given the geographical factors of South Africa, a country locked into the southern hemisphere at the tip of the African continent, there are imperatives for us to provide widebody, long-haul airlift. So we have a strategy that is based on providing widebody, long-haul airlift,” says Lamola. <br/>
Ethiopian Airlines will soon offer high-speed inflight broadband via a partnership with Inmarsat and Airbus. The GX Aviation connectivity, selected through Airbus’ integrated satellite connectivity technology the Airspace Link HBCplus, will help the airline to meet a growing demand amongst airline passengers to have access to the internet whilst flying. Ethiopian Airlines CEO Mesfin Tasew said: “Connectivity is a crucial part of our services and products and bringing Inmarsat’s best-in-class GX Aviation service to our passengers, as part of Airbus’ HBCplus programme, is a major step forward. “We want to give our passengers the possibility to stream, surf and chat from thousands of feet in the air, no matter where their route or destination is.” The airline’s first broadband offering will come with the arrival of the Airbus A350-1000 aircraft, due to be delivered in the third quarter of 2024, as part of its Vision 2035 strategy to double its fleet. <br/>
Two passenger planes bumped into each other on a runway at a major Tokyo airport Saturday but no injuries were reported, a government official said. A Thai Airways International jet headed to Bangkok accidentally hit a parked Eva Airways plane headed to Taipei at Haneda airport, said Isamu Yamane, a deputy administrator in the Transport Ministry. The runway was temporarily closed after the incident but reopened about two hours later after it was cleared, Yamane said. Some flights were delayed and the cause of the accident was still under investigation. Footage broadcast by TBS TV News showed two commercial jets stopped on the same runway. NHK TV showed an official picking up what appeared to be part of an airplane wing and removing it from the runway. The airlines were not immediately available for comment and did not answer repeated calls. A winglet on the Thai Airways plane appeared to be damaged, according to photographs and media reports. Winglets are the vertical projections on the tip of the wing that reduce drag.<br/>
On June 6th, All Nippon Airways (ANA) and WestJet joined the International Air Transport Association's Turbulence Aware Platform. The system collects turbulence data from aircraft flying around the globe to help pilots identify the best flight path, thus reducing fuel burn and safety incidents. IATA's real-time turbulence data-gathering platform was first launched in December 2018 to help airlines mitigate the impact of turbulence, which is a leading cause of passenger and crew injuries and higher fuel costs each year. In the first phase, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, and Aer Lingus were the first airlines to join the program when it was launched. Now a total of 20 airlines globally are participating in the Turbulence Aware Platform. This includes the likes of Southwest, Korean Air, Qatar Airways, China Airlines, Lufthansa, easyJet, and others. To provide real-time data, Turbulence Aware uses information coming directly from the aircraft of member airlines. The system uses National Center for Atmospheric Research software in an aircraft's avionics to continuously calculate the Energy Dissipation Rate (EDR), which is the official metric of the International Civil Aviation Organization to measure turbulence intensity. The EDR data is then transferred into the Turbulence Aware database to be shared with participating airlines.<br/>