Australia said a strip-search of women at Qatar's main airport in 2020 played a part in its decision this year to stop Qatar Airways from selling more flights to Australia, denying it was acting due to pressure from rival Qantas Airways. The claim brings a new element to a controversy surrounding the Australian Labor government's relationship with Qantas which had lobbied against a Qatar Airways request to increase its flights. The conservative opposition has accused Labor of suppressing competition to protect Qantas and launched a Senate inquiry into its decision. Speaking to reporters in Canberra on Thursday, Australian Transport Minister Catherine King said invasive body searches of female passengers, including five Australian women, at Hamad International Airport in 2020 was "context" for the decision to deny the airline more flights to Australia in July this year. "It wasn't the only factor. It was a factor," King said, referring to the incident where women were taken off a Qatar Airways plane and forced to undergo medical examination after the discovery of an abandoned baby at the airport. The Qatar government later apologised. It was "nonsense" to suggest that adding more Qatar Airways flights would have put downward pressure on international fares, King added. Antitrust regulator the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has said more Qatar Airways flights would have lowered fares.<br/>
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Qantas Airways’ woes deepened after the government said it’s looking to shake up the way takeoff and landing slots are granted in Sydney in order to help smaller rivals like Rex and Bonza. Airline access to Australia’s biggest aviation hub “has not kept pace with global developments,” a review of the aviation sector said Thursday. The government wants to modernize slot allocation at the airport and tighten regulation “to ensure that slots are not being misused by airlines,” it said. The proposed policy shift adds to the current crisis at Qantas, days after Alan Joyce quit as chief executive officer amid accusations the airline sold phony seats on thousands of canceled flights. Australia’s antitrust watchdog has said letting other airlines operate more flights in and out of Sydney would be one of the most effective ways of reducing Qantas’s dominance of the domestic market. “We will have more announcements to make about these reforms in due course,” the government said in its review. “There are indications our regulation is not delivering the best outcomes for consumers.” New entrant Bonza and regional operator Rex, which is building a route network between Australia’s biggest cities, are struggling to operate services at Sydney’s airport during peak times. There’s concern that major airlines are manipulating the existing rules to hoard more slots than they need, the government said.<br/>
flynas signed an agreement with the privately-owned Tibah Airports Operation Company to open a base at Madinah. "Our investment in the new operations centre at Prince Mohammad Bin Abdulaziz International Airport in Madinah, which is our fourth base in the Kingdom, comes within the framework of enhancing our operational capabilities and diversifying our international and domestic destinations and routes. The step is in accordance with our strategy for growth and expansion, and it confirms our confidence in the potential of the Saudi market and the ambitious national goals for the air transport sector," CE Bander Almohanna said. The low-cost carrier did not disclose specific network plans but said the base should open in the fourth quarter of 2023, launching with a mix of domestic and international routes aimed primarily at religious traffic to Madinah. The ch-aviation capacities module shows that flynas currently operates 37 weekly scheduled departures out of Madinah, connecting the city with its existing bases at Jeddah, Riyadh, and Dammam, as well as Cairo International. The LCC has a 6.9% market share at the airport by weekly seating capacity.<br/>
The Sri Lankan government is in talks with many private companies and airlines as it prepares to privatise SriLankan Airlines, including Emirates and the Indian conglomerates Tata Sons and Adani Group, according to Veeraperumal Ravindran, the carrier’s regional manager for India, Bangladesh, and Nepal. Ravindran was speaking to the Indian broadsheet The New Indian Express to raise the airline’s profile in the Indian state of Kerala, where it is planning to increase its frequencies between Colombo and Thiruvananthapuram in the coming winter schedules from 6x to 7x weekly and to maintain its 10x weekly frequencies to Kochi International. It also plans to start flights to Kozhikode given the availability of aircraft. There has been a steep rise in traffic from India to Sri Lanka in the last seven months, he said, adding that business at the airline is picking up as “things are becoming more normal in Sri Lanka”. However, he said nothing more about the privatisation. As ch-aviation has previously reported, Tata Sons, the owner of Air India, Air India Express, Vistara, and AirAsia India, has long been considered a possible investor in Sri Lanka’s state-owned carrier.<br/>