Qatar Airways sees strong demand as traveler numbers continue to surge after the pandemic but cautions that customers are becoming more selective in their bookings. Demand is still robust but “it’s not only catch up and revenge like before,” CCO Thierry Antinori said, referring to the sudden wave of post-Covid travel after months of border closures. Passengers are “more selective, they will look more cautiously for what they book, for the quality and the value of what they buy,” he said. That trend should help strong airlines continue to grow and widen the gap with “second tier” carriers, Antinori said — a departure from a year ago, when all carriers benefited from supply bottlenecks. The Gulf carrier, which competes with Dubai-based Emirates and Abu Dhabi’s Etihad, has seen traffic jump by 31% in the first two months of this year as it expands its network and benefits from a travel boom that’s pushing global and regional airlines to record profit. While the Doha-based airline has increased capacity into Europe, routes to Southeast Asia have lagged behind “because we have limited traffic rights and are in no position to sell more into Australia,” Antinori told Bloomberg on Wednesday. Qatar Airways’s access to Australia is restricted after a request to operate more routes to the country was rejected in 2023. The airline viewed the decision as unfair, since Qatar’s national carrier had helped repatriate citizens during the pandemic. In the meantime, regional rival Turkish Airlines made its Australia debut over the weekend via Singapore. It will launch direct flights from its Istanbul hub as it acquires more aircraft over the next few years, highlighting demand for long-haul services from the Middle East. <br/>
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On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was heading from Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, to Beijing, when it deviated from its scheduled path, turning west across the Malay Peninsula. The plane, a Boeing 777 carrying 239 people from 15 countries, is believed to have veered off course and flown south for several hours after radar contact was lost. Some officials believe it may have crashed somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean after running out of fuel, but expansive search efforts over years have returned no answers, no victims, and no plane. The reason the plane went off course and its exact location today remains one of the greatest aviation mysteries of all time. This week, officials suggested a renewed search operation might be undertaken. Story takes a brief look at what we know about the plane’s disappearance 10 years later.<br/>
Over the past decade, Grace Subathirai Nathan graduated from law school, got married, opened a law firm and had two babies. But part of her is frozen in time, still in denial over the loss of her mother on a missing Malaysia Airlines plane in 2014. There has been no funeral service, and Grace, 35, still speaks of her mother in the present tense. When she got married in 2020, she walked down the aisle with a picture of her mother tucked in a bouquet of daisies — chosen because of her mother’s name, Anne Catherine Daisy. The Malaysian criminal lawyer has become one of the key faces of Voice 370, a next-of-kin support group, as she channeled her grief into keeping alive the quest for answers in the mysterious disappearance of flight MH370 that has ripped many families apart. “In terms of going on, I progressed in my career, in my family life ... but I am still trying to push for the search of MH370 to continue. I am trying to push for the plane to be found, so in that way I haven’t moved on,” Grace said in an interview. “Logically in my brain I know I am probably never going to see her again, but I haven’t been able to accept that fully, and I think emotionally, there’s a gap that hasn’t been bridged due to the lack of closure.” The baffling disappearance of flight MH370 still captivates people around the world. The Boeing 777 left Kuala Lumpur with 239 people on March 8, 2014, but dropped off radar screens shortly after and never made it to Beijing, its destination. Investigators say someone deliberately shut down the plane’s communications system and took the plane off course. The jet is believed to have plunged into a remote part of the southern Indian Ocean based on satellite data, but a massive underwater search was fruitless. No wreckage or bodies have ever been found except for some fragments that washed ashore on the eastern African coast and Indian Ocean islands. Families of those on board, many from China, have found different ways to cope with the grief over the years, but one thing is constant — their mission for justice and answers. The pain continues to torment some families in China, who are skeptical of theories of the plane’s fate and hang on to hope that their loved ones may one day return.<br/>