The Canadian Transportation Agency is laying out proposed changes to the passenger rights charter. The reforms come after the Liberal government passed legislation last month to toughen penalties on airlines, shore up the complaint process and target flight disruption loopholes that have allowed airlines to avoid traveller compensation. The amendments to the Air Passenger Protection Regulations spell out the circumstances when an airline would not have to compensate customers, narrowing the field so that most technical problems will no longer give carriers an out. The new rules would also allow customers to claim a refund if the government raises the risk level of travel to certain countries or if a flight disruption prevents them from completing their trip within a reasonable period -- well under the current threshold of 48 hours. The transportation agency is launching public consultations on the proposed overhaul today. The complaints backlog at the regulator now tops 52,000, roughly triple the tally from a year ago and requiring two years on average per case.<br/>
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Heathrow Airport, Britain's busiest, said 7 million passengers traveled through it last month, putting it just below levels recorded before the pandemic, with transatlantic routes driving demand. The monthly figure compares with the pre-pandemic level of 7.2m passengers in June 2019.<br/>
Authorities in Nepal have retrieved the bodies of all six people killed in a helicopter crash on Tuesday, including five Mexican nationals, officials said, the latest in a series of air disasters to strike the Himalayan nation. The cause of the crash near Likkhu, just northeast of the capital Kathmandu, was not yet known, the civil aviation regulator said, adding that the government would set up a committee to investigate. The helicopter was operated by Manang Air, which ferries tourists seeking a view of the country's towering peaks, including Mount Everest, the world's tallest mountain. Rescuers have retrieved the bodies of all six, said Basanta Bhattarai, the most senior bureaucrat in the district of Solukhumbu where the crash occurred. "We have already dispatched four bodies to Kathmandu in a helicopter and are preparing to send the remaining two soon," Bhattarai told Reuters from the crash site. He said rescuers had packed the dead in body bags and were waiting at a helipad for the weather to clear so the chopper could take off. "The bodies were broken into pieces," said Sita Adhikari, another official in the region. A local witness, Nima Tshering Sherpa, said the helicopter had crashed into a bushy hillside. An airport official, Teknath Sitoula, said a Nepali pilot and the five Mexican nationals had been on board.<br/>
SITA, a technology provider for the travel and transport industry, has secured a landmark deal with Airports Authority of India to support one of the biggest growth markets globally, providing technology to 43 of India’s biggest airports. India’s Civil Aviation is among the fastest-growing aviation markets globally and will be a major growth engine to make India a $5t economy by 2024. The deal will see improvements to over 2,700 passenger touchpoints, paving the way for the adoption of new-age solutions to meet the modern passenger’s expectations. Initially deployed across 43 airports, the technologies are scalable to an additional 40 airports over the next seven years. Over 500m passengers are expected to be processed during this period. The rollout of new cloud technology will enable Indian airports to shift to common-use passenger experiences where multiple airlines can leverage the same infrastructure, such as check-in counters, self-service kiosks, and boarding gates. The adoption of cloud solutions also brings new agility and flexibility to scale airport operations efficiently as passenger numbers grow. The cloud-first approach enforces better security and offers airlines a platform to host new progressive technologies and move away from native applications. Centralised cloud hosting of all servers means reduced on-premise infrastructure costs and results in centralized control, enabling proactive monitoring and control of services, SITA said.<br/>