US aviation regulators said on Friday that the 737 Max 9 would stay grounded until Boeing provides additional data. The FAA said it wanted to analyse data from inspections of an initial group of 40 of the roughly 170 grounded jets before it decided whether to lift the flying ban it imposed following a harrowing mid-air blowout of a fuselage section on an Alaska Airlines flight. “We are working to make sure nothing like this happens again,” FAA administrator Michael Whitaker said. Boeing said earlier this week that it had provided instructions to airlines on how to inspect the planes. But the FAA said it needed more information before signing off on the regimen, though it added it was “encouraged by the exhaustive nature of Boeing’s instructions for inspections and maintenance”. United Airlines, which flies more Max 9s than any carrier, said on Friday it was cancelling flights on the plane through to Tuesday, giving it more time to manoeuvre as it braced for winter storms across much of the US. “By cancelling this far in advance, we’re trying to create more certainty for our customers and more flexibility for our frontline teams to do their work,” the airline said. Earlier on Friday the FAA said it was considering whether to strip Boeing of its right to conduct some of its aircraft inspections for planes leaving its factories. The move to review the oversight programme, where Boeing’s own employees certify aircraft safety on behalf of the Federal Aviation Administration, was prompted by the grounding of some 737 Max 9s following the mid-air incident over Oregon last Friday. The so-called “organisation designation authorisation” earlier came under scrutiny when two Boeing 737 Max 8s crashed in 2018 and 2019. Whitaker said the FAA was “exploring” its options for using an independent third-party to oversee inspections of Boeing’s aircraft and its quality controls. “It is time to re-examine the delegation of authority and assess any associated safety risks,” he said. “The grounding of the 737-9 and the multiple production-related issues identified in recent years [at Boeing] require us to look at every option to reduce risk.” <br/>
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Airfares from the US to China and Japan rose about 30% last year as more travelers headed to the countries after pandemic-era travel restrictions were lifted. Fares on 29 routes between the US and Japan's Narita, Haneda and Kansai airports increased 20% to 50% on the year in 2023, according to an analysis by Nikkei and UK aviation information company Cirium. The average increase was 25%, compared with a 7% rise the previous year. Fares for travel from Denver, Colorado, to Narita rose 46%, as United Airlines' hub airport attracted Japan-bound travelers from other parts of the country. The study analyzed 2023 economy-class fares from major U.S. airports to popular overseas destinations. Of the 200 routes that saw the highest price increases, 80 were to Japan or China. Fares on 51 routes between the US and China or Hong Kong rose an average of 31%, a reversal from a 47% drop in 2022. China dropped quarantine requirements for arriving travelers in January 2023. The omicron variant spread around the world in 2022, forcing many Asian countries to retain strict travel restrictions even as the US, Europe and Central and Latin America opened to tourists. US departure records in 2023 reflected strong travel demand to Asia. More than 81m US citizens traveled overseas between January and October, up 24%, with those heading to Asia increasing 140%. Europe-bound departures rose 29% while those who traveled to Mexico by air were up 4%. Airlines have not been able to recover seating capacity to pre-pandemic levels because they sold off large aircraft during the plunge in 2020. Boeing and Airbus Europe have received orders for bigger planes, but delivery times tend to be lengthy due to worker shortages and supply chain bottlenecks.<br/>
As the national capital experiencing severe cold, reaching the lowest minimum temperature of the winter season on Sunday, and low visibility due to dense fog conditions, authorities at Indira Gandhi International Airport diverted 10 flights and delayed nearly 100, besides cancelling several. Delhi airport officials, as reported by news agency PTI, indicated that a total of 10 flights, including 2 international flights, were diverted to Jaipur between 4.30 am and 12 noon. Nearly 100 flights, including overseas services, were delayed, and some of the flights were cancelled due to the bad weather, the officials added. Visibility at Indira Gandhi International Airport was nearly zero between 4 am and 10 am, resulting in no flight departures and only 15 arrivals during that period, PTI report further said citing sources. Under normal weather conditions, the airport manages around 60 departures and arrivals per hour.<br/>
Russian tourists reportedly going on a ski trip to North Korea will be the first international travellers to visit the country since border closings in January 2020 amid the global pandemic lockdown. The tour, published by the Russian state-run Tass news agency and advertised by a Russian tour agency this week, underscores deepening cooperation between Moscow and Pyongyang. It follows the meeting last September between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin at a cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East. The trip scheduled for February was a surprise to Asia observers, who had expected the first post-pandemic tourists to North Korea to come from China, the North’s biggest diplomatic ally and economic pipeline. The webpage of the tour agency, Vostok Intur, says the four-day trip is to start on February 9. According to a Tass report Wednesday, an unspecified number of tourists from Russia's far eastern region of Primorye will first fly to the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, where they will visit monuments such as the “Tower of Juche Idea,” named after the North’s guiding philosophy of “juche” or self-reliance. The tourists will then travel on to the North’s Masik Pass on the east coast, where the country’s most modern ski resort is located, Tass said. Tass said the trip was arranged under an agreement reached between Oleg Kozhemyako, governor of the Primorye region, and North Korean authorities. Kozhemyako travelled to Pyongyang in December for talks on boosting economic ties as part of a flurry of bilateral exchanges since the Kim-Putin summit. Ahead of the trip, he told Russian media he expected to discuss tourism, agriculture and trade cooperation. Lim Eul-chul, a professor at Kyungnam University’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies in Seoul, said that North Korea's receiving Russian tourists before Chinese ones proves again Kim Jong Un is focusing on bolstering partnerships with Russia. He said North Korea and Russia are expected to expand their cooperation in other sectors. But the resumption of Chinese travel will still likely serve as a much bigger source of revenues as they accounted for about 90% of the total international tourists to North Korea before the pandemic. <br/>
Back in October, Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun sought to rally employees reeling from a manufacturing setback, this time involving wrongly drilled holes in a crucial aircraft section — yet another blow to a company that once enjoyed a sterling reputation for building awesome flying machines. “I have heard those outside our company wondering if we’ve lost a step. I view it as quite the opposite,” Calhoun wrote in a company memo, going on to tout the “rigor around our quality processes” at the US aircraft manufacturer. “I am proud of the team, and confident we’ll look back on this time period as when we took the necessary steps that set Boeing on the right course for the future.” Just days into 2024, that renewed optimism was sucked right out of a gaping hole in the side of a Boeing 737 Max 9. On Jan. 5, the desk-sized cover for an optional door was cleanly ejected from the almost-new aircraft, exposing 177 people on board to the fear of being pulled into the evening sky at 4,900m. Fortunately, no lives were lost, and the jet touched down safely in an emergency landing at Portland, Oregon. Yet as smartphone images and video of the terrifying incident went viral worldwide, Boeing engineers, investors and, above all, the flying public, were reminded of just how far this company has fallen — and the long road to recovery that lies ahead. Today, Boeing’s name and its troubled 737 Max model are linked to some of the worst aircraft safety and design failures in recent aviation history. Some 346 people lost their lives in the Boeing 737 Max crashes of Lion Air Flight 610 in late 2018 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 less than five months later. After lengthy civil and criminal probes, Boeing agreed to pay $2.5b in a deferred prosecution agreement related to the two crashes with the Department of Justice in early 2021. Now Boeing is confronted with an investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration and months of congressional and media scrutiny, and the options for Calhoun and his team aren’t alluring.<br/>
Lockheed Martin Corp and the US space agency are preparing to give the public a sneak peek of a plane that could pave the way for airlines to dramatically speed up flights. The X-59, to be unveiled on Friday afternoon local time in Palmdale, California, has been designed to fly faster than the speed of sound — about 760 miles per hour at sea level — but with much less noise. When planes break the sound barrier — known as Mach 1 — a loud and continuous sonic boom is created that can shatter windows on the ground. The US banned civilian aircraft reaching this speed over land in 1973. Lockheed Martin won a contract in 2018 valued at about $250m to build a demonstrator plane, which has room for one pilot and is powered by a General Electric F414 engine, to help overcome this hurdle. The aircraft is designed to reach 1.5 times the speed of sound, while reducing a sonic boom to a weak thump with its v-shaped wing and elongated nose. The company originally had expected to fly the X-59 in 2021. The overall project, including testing, will cost about $632m over eight years, NASA said. If the X-59 is successful and then applied to commercial aviation, flight times could be reduced dramatically. Lockheed has said the plane will reach speeds of 925 mph, far surpassing today’s single-aisle passenger jets that top out at about 550 mph.<br/>
Airbus has removed the only outstanding order for A330-300s from its backlog, an agreement for eight aircraft with China’s state aviation supply firm CASC. The adjustment means all 776 A330-300s on firm order have been delivered, almost exactly 30 years since French airline Air Inter put the first into service in January 1994. CASC placed an order for 30 A330-300s in October 2015, but still had eight aircraft on the airframer’s backlog by 2019. Airbus’s latest full-year backlog data shows the aircraft have been removed. There is no indication which carrier was destined to operate the twinjets. Airbus is still taking orders for the A330-200 shrink, because it is used as the platform for the military MRTT tanker-transport. The A330-300 has evolved into the A330-900 – the larger member of the re-engined A330neo family – which has taken 284 orders. Gross orders for the A330neo during 2023 reached 37 aircraft, all but one the -900 variant. Airbus CCO Christian Scherer, speaking during an 11 January briefing, said the full-year sales figures showed the widebody market was “coming back quite forcefully”.<br/>