The National Transportation Safety Board and FAA said on Friday it will investigate a Southwest Airlines flight that departed from a temporarily closed runway in Maine earlier this week. The FAA said on Tuesday an airport vehicle exited the runway before Southwest Flight 4805, a Boeing 737, began its takeoff roll and departed around 5:45 a.m. local time (0945 GMT). Southwest said it is engaged with the NTSB and FAA to understand the circumstances of the departure. After the incident the plane continued safely to Baltimore, Southwest said. Several other incidents involving Southwest flights in recent months have raised concerns. Last week, the FAA said it was investigating a Southwest flight that descended to a low altitude of around 500 feet (152.4 m) about 9 miles (14.5 km) from the Oklahoma City airport. After the automated Minimum Safe Altitude Warning sounded, an air traffic controller alerted the flight crew of Southwest Airlines Flight 4069, which had departed from Las Vegas. Earlier this month, the FAA and NTSB said they were investigating a May 25 Southwest flight of a Boeing 737 MAX. The NTSB said the plane experienced a "Dutch roll" at 34,000 feet while en route from Phoenix, to Oakland, California. Such lateral asymmetric movements are named after a Dutch ice-skating technique and can pose serious safety risks.<br/>
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US start-up carrier Avelo Airlines plans to stop operating flights from Redding to Southern California in August, citing the departure of its ground handling partner at Redding Regional airport. Avelo confirms on 27 June that its business partner Trego Dugan Aviation, which provides Avelo’s ground-handling service in Redding, will no longer serve the airport. ”As a result, we’ve made the decision to cancel Avelo’s route between [Redding] and Los Angeles’ Hollywood Burbank airport effective 26 August,” it says. ”This decision also enables us to better utilise our resources elsewhere in Avelo’s system,” the carrier adds. The Redding-Burbank route has proven popular in the rural region of Northern California, which largely lacks commercial air service. Sacramento International airport is a 270km (168mi) drive from Redding. Major regional carrier SkyWest Airlines operates flights on behalf of Alaska Airlines out Redding. <br/>
A strike by plane mechanics forced Canada’s second largest airline, WestJet, to cancel hundreds more flights Sunday, upending plans of roughly 110,000 travelers over the Canada Day long weekend and prompting the carrier to demand action from the federal government. Some 680 workers, whose daily inspections and repairs are essential to airline operations, walked off the job Friday evening despite a directive for binding arbitration from the labor minister. “WestJet is in receipt of a binding arbitration order and awaits urgent clarity from the government that a strike and arbitration cannot exist simultaneously; this is something they have committed to address and like all Canadians we are waiting,” WestJet Airlines President Diederik Pen said in a statement Sunday. Since Thursday, WestJet has cancelled 829 flights scheduled to fly between then and Monday — the busiest travel weekend of the season. The vast majority of Sunday’s trips were called off as WestJet pared down its 180-plane fleet to 32 active aircraft and topped the global list for cancellations among major airlines over the weekend. Both WestJet and the Airplane Mechanics Fraternal Association have accused the other side of refusing to negotiate in good faith. The union’s goal remains a deal hammered out through bargaining rather than by an arbitrator — a route it opposed from the start. The union says its demands around wages would cost WestJet less than $8m Canadian (US$5.6m) beyond what the company has offered for the first year of the collective agreement — the first contract between the two sides. It has acknowledged the gains would surpass compensation for industry colleagues across Canada and sit more on par with US counterparts.<br/>
An escalation of industrial action is “clearly on the table” if talks at the Labour Court on Monday between Aer Lingus and the union representing pilots fails to “produce a result”, the president of the Irish Air Line Pilots’ Association (Ialpa) has said. Both sides will return to the court on Monday afternoon in a bid to break the deadlock over the bitter pay dispute at the carrier. It follows five consecutive days of industrial action undertaken by pilots represented by Ialpa, part of the trade union Fórsa, including an eight-hour stoppage on Saturday that forced Aer Lingus to cancel a further 120 flights. Some 500 Aer Lingus pilots marched in the rain around Dublin Airport on Saturday as part of the stoppage. Late last week, both sides accepted an invitation from the Labour Court to return to the table on Monday after a previous round of discussion broke down last Tuesday. A separate round of talks between the two sides collapsed on Thursday after what the pilot body’s president, Cpt Mark Tighe, described as an “escalation” of the dispute by the International Airlines Group (IAG)-owned carrier. Reports over the weekend suggested Ialpa had lowered its pay demand in recent talks but the offer was now off the table following the collapse of those discussions, it is understood.<br/>
A Ryanair Boeing 737-Max airliner is under investigation after it descended at high speed on approach to Stansted Airport last year. Flight FR1269 dived at 321mph after a two-hour journey from Klagenfurt, Austria to London on 4 December 2023. According to flight data, the Boeing 737-Max made a steady descent to 2,350ft to prepare for landing in light rain at Stansted, but aborted the approach to climb for a go-around. During the second landing attempt, the plane plunged from 4,425ft to 2,300ft in just 17 seconds with a speed increase from 226mph to 321mph. Investigating the “serious incident”, the UK’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) logged the aircraft’s steep decline as a “high speed and high nose down pitch attitude” during a go-around procedure. The Ryanair Boeing made the “unstable approach” far faster than the acceptable descent rate rules, after aborting the original landing. Assisting the AAIB, Ireland’s Air Accident Investigation Unit described this as a “level bust” – this is when an aircraft fails to fly at the level it has been cleared to. The aircraft landed safely at London Stansted 10 minutes after the unsteady go-around. No passengers on the 197-seat aircraft were injured during the abrupt descent, but flight records show that the Boeing 737 airliner did not take off in the two days following the incident. A spokesperson for Ryanair said: “This was a case of an unstable approach. The crew performed a ‘go around’ and landed normally on the second approach in line with Ryanair procedure. Ryanair reported this matter to the AAIB in compliance with our operating manual and we have provided full details to, and are cooperating fully with, this routine AAIB investigation. We can make no further comment until such time as the AAIB have completed their review of this flight.” A full investigation by the AAIB into the rare incident is ongoing – flight FR1269 is one of just six airline incidents in the UK to prompt such a probe last year.<br/>
Emirates Airline, the world's biggest long-haul carrier, has said that it is postponing its deployment of new Airbus A350 aircraft because of delivery delays from the European plane maker, forcing schedule changes in the routes. The delay pushes back the A350's debut by nearly two months: Edinburgh will now become the first route to be served with the aircraft from November 4, unchanged from the original announcement, replacing Bahrain, which was supposed to start on September 15, Emirates said. “Once we begin receiving our A350s, we will expedite their entry into service as quickly as possible and will work hard to minimise the impact of the delays,” an Emirates representative told The National on Saturday. Aside from Bahrain and Edinburgh – one of nine destinations Emirates said in May that the A350s will initially serve – Kuwait, Muscat, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Lyon and Bologna have been deferred because of delivery delays, it said. “There are no changes to flight frequencies to these destinations, only a change in the type of aircraft operating on the route,” the representative said. Toulouse-based Airbus revised its aircraft delivery downwards with plans for about 770 commercial aircraft handovers, down from a projection of 800. The Airbus A350 jets are central to Emirates' long-term strategy. With them, the airline aims to serve ultra-long-haul destinations in the US, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand – all up to 15 hours of flying time from Dubai – following the initial launch of the wide-body jets on mainly regional routes. Emirates has 65 Airbus A350-900 aircraft on order, deliveries of which were supposed to start in August and through to the next three and half years.<br/>
Airbus is closing in on a preliminary deal with Philippine budget airline Cebu Air for dozens of narrow-body jets to be announced in the coming days, three people familiar with the matter said on Friday. Cebu Air, which operates as Cebu Pacific, and Airbus both declined to comment on any commercial discussions. The airline has been looking to order 100-150 narrow-body jets from Boeing or Airbus worth up to $12b at list prices, in what was seen as potentially the Philippines' largest jet purchase. Two of the people said the deal involved 70 jets, including a number of A321neo models. Cebu Pacific has said it aims to more than double its fleet by 2035 to take advantage of a long-term travel boom across Southeast Asia following the COVID-19 pandemic. It operates a fleet of 64 Airbus and 14 ATR aircraft, which will increase to 92 by end-2024.<br/>