The problems with flight delays and cancellations that have plagued US travelers this week are mostly over — except at struggling United Airlines. Tracking service FlightAware shows that there are 487 flights to, from or within the United States that have been canceled as of noon ET Thursday and another 2,000 delayed. For canceled flights, the problem is clearly focused on United, with 383 of those cancellations. That means 13% of United flights scheduled for Thursday were already canceled, or nearly one out of every seven. The next greatest number of canceled flights for a US airline Thursday is at JetBlue, which has canceled 21 flights, or 2% of its schedule. Since Saturday there have been a total of 8,000 US flights canceled and another 42,750 flights delayed according to FlightAware. Even before Thursday, United was the focus of the problem, with nearly 3,000 flights canceled since Saturday, or 36% of the industry total. United declined to give CNN an estimate of affected passengers, but based on United’s typical passenger volumes from previous earnings reports and the number of canceled flights, there were likely more than 400,000 passengers booked on canceled United flights. There were likely more than 1m passengers booked on the 8,000 canceled flights industrywide, based on statistics from aviation analytics firm Cirium and the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Finding space on other flights for affected passengers will prove difficult during a busy holiday travel period. Part of the problem is that US airlines still have only about 90% of the capacity that they had at the same time in 2019, ahead of the pandemic, according to Cirium. But demand to fly is very strong. The TSA has estimated that Friday will bring the highest number of passengers being screened at airport checkpoints since the start of the pandemic. Even the problems at United early Thursday would mark an improvement from Tuesday and Wednesday, when the airline had to cancel more than 700 flights each day, or more than a quarter of its schedule. But United could see additional delays and cancellations as Thursday progresses.<br/>
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A report of a share sale by state investment company Temasek sent shares of Singapore Airlines (SIA) tumbling on Friday. SIA’s top investor is selling around $400m worth of shares, or a 1.85% stake, in the national carrier, Reuters reported on Wednesday. The shares are priced between $7.202 and $7.283 apiece, representing a 3.97% and 2.89% discount respectively to the last close of $7.50 on the Singapore Exchange on Wednesday, according to a term sheet seen by Reuters. Temasek will continue to be a major shareholder in SIA with a 53.5% stake, according to Reuters’ calculations. SIA shares fell when trading began on Friday. At 10.29am, they were down 34 cents, or 4.5%, to $7.16. The stock was the most heavily traded by value, with 69.4m shares changing hands. “As an active investor, we regularly reshape and rebalance our portfolio to deliver sustainable returns over the long term,” Juliet Teo, Temasek’s head of transportation and logistics, said in an e-mailed statement in response to a Reuters query on the sale. “We are committed to the long-term success of SIA and continue to maintain a majority stake in it,” she added. As at Wednesday, SIA shares have rallied 35.6% in 2023 as profits surged after three years of losses. In May, the carrier reported its highest-ever annual net profit of $2.16b for the year ended March as travel rebounded following the Covid-19 pandemic.<br/>
An Air New Zealand flight to Chicago was forced to shut down an engine this week after developing a fuel leak in what has been described as an “incredibly unusual event”. Flight NZ26 was about an hour out of Auckland last Saturday when a warning system in the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner alerted pilots to a fuel discrepancy, Air New Zealand head of flight operations Hugh Pearce said. The system then guided the pilots through a checklist to determine the cause of the discrepancy, which turned out to be a fuel leak in the left engine – one of two Rolls-Royce engines on the Dreamliner. The fuel discrepancy was reported on Saturday, but the fuel leak and single-engine landing have just come to light. “The checklist then guides you to shut the engine down to secure the problem and ensure there’s no further discrepancy generated, and that’s precisely what the pilots did,” Pearce said. “So they went through this problem-solving while they were turning around and coming back to Auckland. They descended, they dumped some fuel so they would be lighter for landing, and then they continued through for a single-engine landing.” Pearce said it is “incredibly unusual” to shut down an engine for any reason, describing a fuel leak as a “very unusual event”. “To give you an idea, the worldwide statistics are 0.0057 per thousand engine hours”. Air New Zealand pilots train for single-engine landings on routine simulator sessions, which take place over two days every six months. After landing safely in Auckland, the aircraft was inspected by engineers, who confirmed the fuel leak in the engine.<br/>
Not wanting to separate Swifties from their Wildest Dreams, Air New Zealand will sell 2000 more seats to get Taylor Swift concert-goers to Australia in February. From 2pm on Friday, the new return flights connecting Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch with Melbourne and Sydney will go on sale. Already some 3500 people have booked flights to coincide with Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour dates, Air New Zealand spokesperson Leanne Geraghty said. But the seats won’t last long, and they won’t be cheap, she warned. Be ...Ready For It. “During high-demand periods, fares increase, so we can manage a small supply of seats for last-minute travel,” Geraghty said. Flights more than doubled in price before the concert tickets went on sale. “We also typically see higher demand and hence pricing for late week and weekend travel dates. We recommend Swifties get on board with booking flights early so they don’t miss out.”<br/>