Thousands of flights have been delayed or canceled Tuesday following a round of severe storms that hammered the eastern United Sates. More than 350 flights were canceled Tuesday, with another 2,200 delayed, according to data from FlightAware. It’s a significant improvement from Monday when 8,200 flights were delayed and 1,600 were canceled. Delta has 100 cancellations, roughly 3% of its schedule, and another 325 flights were delayed Tuesday. New York’s LaGuardia is the most impacted airport with 21 flights canceled and 39 flights delayed. Other major airports dealing with a small amount of cancellations and delays include Atlanta, Newark Liberty and Boston Logan. Monday’s round of severe storms left nearly 400,000 homes and business were without power in a large swath of eastern US a day earlier and left at least two people dead, damaged neighborhoods and stranded dozens of people on a Maryland road for hours. Although the weather may be to partly to blame, these delays and cancellations have been par for the course for months now. Staffing shortages affecting airlines and traffic control personnel have caused ground stops throughout the summer travel season. The FAA said Monday it has limited ability to direct New York flights north through Canadian airspace because of “staffing issues” in Canada.<br/>
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Lower domestic airfares that travelers have enjoyed this summer will start to disappear after mid-September, with a new report predicting higher prices through the winter holidays. US round-trip tickets cost about $257 on average, below both last year and the pre-pandemic levels of 2019, according to a consumer-travel index released Tuesday by booking app Hopper Inc. Fares are expected to climb about 10% to $283 in November and December as the slide that has punished some domestic airlines reverses. International passengers won’t see much relief, with tickets remaining higher to Europe and Asia following a shift in demand toward overseas destinations. Fares to Asia are 59% above 2019 levels because flying capacity hasn’t fully returned on those routes, Hopper said. Prices will stay elevated until more flights are added. Fares to Europe that reached record levels over the summer have moderated the last few weeks and will stabilize this fall on strong demand, Hopper said.<br/>
US officials said Tuesday they have referred 22 more cases involving unruly passengers on airline flights to the FBI for possible criminal charges. The allegations include sexually assaulting female passengers, attacking flight attendants, trying to break into the cockpit, making terror threats, and smoking in airplane lavatories. The FAA said the incidents happened as far back as late 2021 and as recently as April of this year. The FAA can seek fines of up to $37,000 against unruly passengers, but it lacks authority to file criminal charges; that is why the agency refers some cases to the FBI. Reports of passengers acting up on flights peaked in 2021, with many of the roughly 6,000 incidents involving anger over a since-dropped mask requirement. The number dropped under 2,500 last year and under 1,200 so far this year, the FAA said. The FAA said it has referred more than 270 cases to the FBI since late 2021.<br/>
US regulators are warning airlines to limit the use of an anti-icing system on Boeing 737 Max jets in dry air to avoid overheating engine-housing parts, which could cause them to break away from the plane. The FAA says the risk to the flying public is serious enough that it will put the order into effect in just 15 days, and without allowing public comment first. The FAA said if the engine inlet gets too hot, parts of the housing could come off and strike a window, causing decompression and a hazard to passengers in window seats. The finding affects LEAP-1B engines used on all versions of the Max. The engines are made by CFM International, a joint venture between General Electric and France’s Safran. In 2018, a Southwest Airlines passenger died after part of the engine housing on an older version of Boeing’s 737 jet flew off and broke the window next to her seat. That engine failure started with a broken fan blade. The FAA said there have been no reports of the overheating problem occurring on Max flights. It said the potential for damage was discovered during flight testing and analysis in June. Boeing said overheating of the inlets — which are made by Boeing, not CFM — can only happen under “very specific” conditions and wasn’t known until recently.<br/>
Brazil has the potential to become one of the major global players in sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), a Boeing executive said on Tuesday, as the sector attempts to meet its ambitious goal of reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The target agreed within the IATA representing airlines will largely depend on the development and increased production of SAF, which is made from renewable resources such as vegetable oils or waste. The South American country, one of the world's largest agricultural producers, is already a global leader in biofuels such as ethanol, made from sugarcane or corn, and soyoil-derived biodiesel. "Brazil has the technical capacity, qualified workforce and raw material to post the concrete results and impacts needed for us to solve together this global challenge of how to decarbonize aviation," Boeing's Latin America and the Caribbean head, Landon Loomis, told a forum hosted by the company in Sao Paulo. "Boeing already is one of the world's largest buyers of sustainable aviation fuel," he noted. While radical technological change is deemed key to cutting aviation emissions, the sector's main focus has been on fuels that can be used in existing jet engines, such as plant or waste-based SAF and synthetic alternatives. Securing enough SAF supply is the industry's biggest challenge in its push for net-zero emissions, amid high costs and slow production growth.<br/>IATA estimates the use of SAF could account for 65% of the industry's efforts to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.<br/>
Frankfurt Airport operator Fraport Tuesday said its 2023 core profit would hit the upper half of its forecast range after second-quarter earnings were boosted by strong travel demand. Finance chief Matthias Zieschang forecast a "huge and significant" increase in Chinese passengers travelling to and from Frankfurt next year, with capacity set to reach up to 90% of pre-pandemic levels by December from under 40% in the second quarter. "Passengers with high purchasing power are coming back," Zieschang said. The German group, which operates 28 airports around the world, expects group earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) to reach the upper half of the previously projected range of E1.04-1.20b this year. Net profit should come in at the upper half of a range of E300-420m, it said. Demand for leisure travel, which has boosted profits for airlines and airports since pandemic restrictions ended last year, shows little sign of abating despite squeezed household incomes. Traffic at Fraport's home Frankfurt base grew 29% in the first half, reaching around 87% of 2019 traffic in July, preliminary figures showed. Full-year passenger numbers are likely to end in the middle of a forecast range of 80-90% of 2019 levels.<br/>
Flights were cancelled, bullet trains partially suspended and factories shuttered on Tuesday as Typhoon Khanun headed past Japan's southernmost main island of Kyushu, bringing heavy rain. The typhoon last week reportedly killed at least two people, injured more than 100 and cut off power for several hundred thousand people in the southern Okinawa region before barrelling towards Taiwan. The weather system then swung back to the Okinawa area and on Wednesday was due to roar along the western coast of Kyushu towards South Korea, according to forecasters. Japan Airlines on Tuesday cancelled 132 flights, which affected some 8,390 people, a spokeswoman told AFP. ANA also scrapped flights between Kagoshima in southern Kyushu and Tokyo.<br/>
Slowing down climate change is going to require big fixes, and many small ones, too. Case in point: contrails, those wispy white lines that trail some airplanes flying high in the sky. Contrails, short for condensation trails, are produced when exhaust from jets mixes with water vapor at extremely high altitudes, forming minuscule ice particles. Scientists have known for decades that in some cases, contrails spread out across huge areas, trapping heat in the atmosphere. That may sound insignificant given the vastness of the sky. Yet studies have estimated that contrails are responsible for as much as 35% of all of the planetary warming attributable to aviation. By some measures, contrails account for upward of 1% of human-caused global warming. “We now know enough about contrails and their impact to know we need to do something about it,” said Andrew Chen of RMI, a nonprofit that promotes sustainability. Here’s the new part: A team from Google, Breakthrough Energy and American Airlines says it has demonstrated a relatively cheap and easy way to significantly reduce contrails. Their research, which was shared exclusively with Climate Forward before being submitted to a scientific journal, found that adjusting a plane’s altitude by just a couple thousand feet reduced contrail formation by more than half. The results, they say, suggest it could be relatively easy, quick and cheap to start reducing contrails at scale. “The opportunity here is twofold,” said Chen, who was not involved in the project. “It’s near-term, and it’s cost-effective.”<br/>
United Parcel Service lowered its full-year profit forecast as the courier contends with shifting consumer habits and rising costs after a tentative labor agreement. Revenue is expected to be $93b in 2023, down from its prior forecast of $97b, UPS said Tuesday. UPS now expects an adjusted operating margin this year of 11.8%, compared with an earlier forecast of 12.8%. UPS said the guidance change was “primarily to reflect the volume impact from labor negotiations and the costs associated with the tentative agreement” that was reached on July 25. The stock fell as much as 7.4% in premarket trading in New York. “We are pleased to have reached agreement with the Teamsters,” CEO Carol Tomé said in the statement. “Looking ahead, we will stay on strategy to capture growth in the most attractive parts of the market and make our global integrated network even more efficient.” The stock this year had climbed 4.8% year through Monday, trailing an 18% gain in the S&P 500 Index. UPS is navigating a challenging environment marked by declining package volume, pushback from customers over pandemic-era price increases and rising expenses. The company will face higher labor costs after negotiating a five-year contract with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters that gives unionized workers hefty raises. The union has said that the new labor contract adds $30b of new money, including for costs to add air conditioning to UPS delivery vehicles purchased after the end of this year. The contract still must be ratified by the 340,000 workers it covers and the results of that vote will be given on Aug. 22, the union has said. Analysts expect the company will give a detailed breakdown of the financial impact only after it’s ratified.<br/>
Boeing delivered 43 aircraft to customers last month as it tries to ramp up output with airline customers clamoring for new jets. The handovers were down from 60 in June but brought Boeing’s total deliveries in the first seven months of the year to 309, an increase of nearly 28% from the same period in 2022. Last month, Boeing said it was transitioning production of its bestselling 737 Max plane to a pace of 38 a month from 31. Despite production problems earlier this year and a brief strike at key supplier Spirit Aerosystems, Boeing’s CFO, Brian West, last month reiterated the company still expects to deliver 400 to 450 Max jets this year. Boeing’s chief rival, Airbus, last week said it has handed over 381 planes in the first seven months of the year. Boeing said it logged net orders for 52 aircraft in July, which included a firmed-up order from Saudi Arabian Airlines, or Saudia, for 39 Boeing 787 Dreamliners, a deal first announced in March.<br/>