The US government has started requiring migrants without passports to submit to facial recognition technology to take domestic flights under a change that prompted confusion this week among immigrants and advocacy groups in Texas. It is not clear exactly when the change took effect, but several migrants with flights out of South Texas on Tuesday told advocacy groups that they thought they were being turned away. The migrants included people who had used the government’s online appointment system to pursue their immigration cases. Advocates were also concerned about migrants who had crossed the US-Mexico border illegally before being processed by Border Patrol agents and released to pursue their immigration cases. The TSA said Thursday that migrants without proper photo identification who want to board flights must submit to facial recognition technology to verify their identity using Department of Homeland Security records. “If TSA cannot match their identity to DHS records, they will also be denied entry into the secure areas of the airport and will be denied boarding,” the agency said.<br/>
general
Airline executives are frustrated with Boeing as its safety crisis has upended their business plans. But in a tight market for large aircraft supplied by two companies, they have little choice but do business with the US plane maker. Despite some public displays of alarm — United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby flew to France to talk with Airbus as Boeing's latest crisis erupted — carriers are still negotiating new plane orders, looking to leverage Boeing's delays to secure better terms. Boeing's delivery schedule faces extended delays following a Jan. 5 mid-flight cabin blowout that exposed problems with safety and quality control in its manufacturing processes. But rival Airbus already has a backlog of orders that makes shifting over a non-starter. Instead, airlines are adopting a variety of strategies to try to stay in the game with Boeing, using orders of one type of plane as a placeholder to possibly take deliveries of a different model. They also are negotiating harder, looking to use production delays to get discounts from the plane maker on new orders and compensation for financial losses. "Boeing customers don't have much option but to stick with Boeing whether they like it or not," said Scott Hamilton, managing director at aviation consulting firm Leeham Company.<br/>
US accident investigators said they remain in the dark about who performed the work on the panel of a Boeing Co. jet that failed in January, despite high-level pleas to the company and interviews at the factory where the fateful removal of the part was performed. NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said she made a direct request to Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun last week, according to a letter to Senators on Wednesday. Her team has also been conducting interviews with workers at the company’s Renton, Washington, factory. Investigators first requested the identity of the crew who worked on a panel that failed on the flight four days after the Jan. 5 accident, Homendy said in the letter. Boeing has said it’s unable to find the records, and factory security footage that may have helped had been overwritten by then. “The absence of those records will complicate the NTSB’s investigation moving forward,” Homendy said. Homendy’s comments highlight the escalating tensions between the government agency and the nation’s largest planemaker. The NTSB says it’s not getting what it needs to drill down into the causes of the accident, while Boeing maintains it’s being fully cooperative. When Homendy testified to the Senate panel last week, she said it was “absurd” that investigators hadn’t received all documents and information sought from the manufacturer. Boeing said in a statement that it will support the investigation in a “transparent and proactive fashion.” Homendy and the company have said that the video footage is routinely erased after 30 days. After Homendy’s testimony on March 6, the company said it had provided the NTSB with names of all employees who may have worked on the panel. She spoke with Calhoun directly by phone, who was unable to specify the people directly involved “and maintained that Boeing has no records of the work performed.”<br/>
It took decades for Boeing to build a reputation as one of the most reliable companies on the planet. It’s taken less than six years to undo it all and leave the once-great American company facing an uncertain future. Regulators, airlines, fliers and even Boeing’s own workers are practically in revolt after a series of mid-flight disasters and a steady erosion of the company’s quality standards. Investors are none too thrilled, either: Boeing’s stock (BA) is down 27% for the year, making it the second-worst performer in the S&P 500, behind Tesla. The latest headache for Boeing came Monday, when a 787 Dreamliner flying from Australia to New Zealand plunged suddenly mid-flight, injuring several passengers. It’s not clear what, if any, culpability Boeing has here — it said it’s gathering information about what went wrong. But the accounts from passengers are hardly flattering at a moment when Boeing is already under federal investigation for the Jan. 5 door-plug blowout. For any other company, now would be the time to call the lawyers and start working on a sale or a bankruptcy. Within the past six years, Boeing has been found responsible for two fatal crashes that killed 346 people, lost tens of billions of dollars, paid billions more in fines and settlements, and it made headlines for repeated quality control problems. But Boeing is not any other company. And it barely even has regulators to stand up to. The FAA is so underfunded that it has partially relied on Boeing to self-regulate. It’s a wonder that the agency found this week that Boeing failed half of its audit of its production facility. (The FAA has instructed the plane maker to submit a plan to fix its production problems by late May.) Boeing, in a statement, said it is working diligently to work out the issues highlighted by the FAA.n“Based on the FAA audit, our quality stand downs and the recent expert panel report, we continue to implement immediate changes and develop a comprehensive action plan to strengthen safety and quality, and build the confidence of our customers and their passengers,” Boeing said in a statement. “We are squarely focused on taking significant, demonstrated action with transparency at every turn.” Story has more.<br/>
Brazil and Argentina signed a memorandum of understanding for an open skies agreement to expand flights between the two South American countries, ending weekly limits on scheduled passenger flights and facilitating cargo flights, Brazil's Foreign Affairs Ministry said Wednesday. The agreement, signed within the framework of meetings between Brazil's National Civil Aviation Agency and Argentina's National Civil Aviation Administration, took place on March 6 and 7. "With the signing of the instrument, Brazilian and Argentine airlines will be able to freely determine the number of passenger flights they wish to offer between the two countries. Until now, companies on each side were limited to offering a maximum of 170 weekly flights, according to the regulations of each country," said the ministry. "The measure will give more flexibility to companies to plan their operations and could lead to an increase in the offer of services and greater competition on the routes that link Brazil and Argentina," it said.<br/>
Air traffic chaos over last year's August bank holiday was made worse by on-call engineers being unable to fix the issue from home, a report has said. More than 700,000 passengers were affected by an air traffic meltdown that had knock-on effects for days. Industry group Airlines UK said the report, compiled for the Civil Aviation Authority, showed air traffic control processes were "wholly inadequate". Air traffic provider NATS said it had made "improvements" since last summer. Airlines have said the delays cost them tens of millions of pounds. On 28 August last year, a busy bank holiday Monday, there was a major technical failure at NATS which led to widespread flight disruption that left thousands of passengers stranded. An independent interim report into what went wrong, which was commissioned by the Civil Aviation Authority, found the problem started when the NATS system struggled to cope with an unusual flight plan and shut down. A backup system also shut down, leaving manual processing of flight plans as the only option. NATS engineers working on site could not fix the issue, so the problem was escalated to on-call engineers higher up the chain. It took one of the senior engineers an hour and a half to get to the NATS site and try to perform a system restart, which was not possible remotely. That specialist engineer did not get there until more than three hours into the incident. Help was then sought from another engineer, and system manufacturer Frequentis was called after four hours, when stored flight plan data had run out. The system was down for close to six-and-three-quarter hours. About three quarters of a million passengers were affected by the incident - which caused widespread cancellations on a bank holiday Monday - with "considerable financial and emotional consequences", the report said. That includes 300,000 people hit by cancellations, 95,000 by long delays of more than three hours, and a further 300,000 by shorter delays. Story has more.<br/>
About 22 miles southeast of Mumbai’s badly congested airport that opened 82 years back, workers in hard hats are high up on scaffolds building an alternative. Others are flattening a nearby hill to finish the first of two runways so that India’s financial capital can finally have a second airport. In many ways, the Adani Group-helmed $2.1b project in the satellite city of Navi Mumbai is a microcosm of the massive infrastructure overhaul underway in India as its Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeks to outrun China. For Gautam Adani, it’s a test of whether he can put India on the global aviation map. The airport, with a lotus-shaped design mimicking India’s national flower as well as the election symbol for Modi’s party, should start operations in March next year with capacity for 20m passengers a year. That will ramp up to 90m by 2032 if there’s enough demand, according to Arun Bansal, the CEO of Adani Airport Holdings, India’s largest private sector airport operator that also runs the existing Mumbai airport. Navi Mumbai airport will be a “perfect” candidate to become an international transit hub on par with some of the world’s busiest aerodromes like Dubai, London, Frankfurt and Singapore, Bansal said in an interview. “Geographically, India is in a very advantageous situation,” he said. “There’s hardly any country where you can’t fly within 12 hours.” A wave of plane deals and airport buildouts can aid that ambition. Air India, IndiGo and upstart Akasa have ordered more than 1,100 aircraft, combined. <br/>
Europe's air safety regulator will take whatever time is needed to approve China's C919 passenger jet, its top official told Reuters, dampening Beijing's hopes of quickly breaking into a market marked by jet shortages and a Boeing safety crisis. China is stepping up regulatory pressure to win foreign backing for its new jet, but industry sources have warned the landmark approvals from Western regulators could take years. The COMAC C919 narrow body jet - designed to compete with best-selling models of dominant planemakers Airbus and Boeing - entered service in China last May after winning domestic safety certification in 2022. Luc Tytgat, acting executive director of the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), said COMAC had initially asked for European approval in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic stopped work. It re-launched the bid in November, requesting that the work be completed by 2026. "Honestly I don't know if we will be able to do it yet: the plane is too new to us to know how easy or difficult it will be," he said in an interview at EASA's Cologne headquarters. "Since 2019, things continued to be done in China so we now have to be briefed on the changes," he added. The comments come weeks after China's state-owned planemaker flew the C919 at the Singapore Airshow as it promotes the jet as a new alternative at a time when Airbus waiting lists are full and Boeing faces production quality concerns over its 737 MAX.<br/>