Operations at Salgado Filho International Airport in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, one of the country's busiest, will resume in October after unprecedented floods in the region disrupted flights in May.<br/>The airport, operated by Fraport, had its runways and corridors submerged in water as heavy rains battered Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil's southernmost state of which Porto Alegre is the capital, killing more than 180 people. Flights to and from Salgado Filho had been temporarily suspended due to the damages to the runway and terminals. The government allowed carriers to operate at the nearby Canoas Air Force Base, but at reduced rates as the base did not have adequate infrastructure. The government said late on Thursday Salgado Filho's operations will resume from Oct. 21, initially with 128 daily flights. Airlines were cleared to sell tickets for flights to and from Porto Alegre starting Friday. The airport is expected to operate at full capacity from Dec. 16, the government added. "Initially there will be more than 3,000 flights per month, which will, without a doubt, accelerate the recovery of the state's economy," Ports and Airports Minister Silvio Costa Filho said. Azul, one of Brazil's largest airlines, said in a statement on Friday it would be the company with the most slots available when operations restart, planning to operate as many as 60 flights per day.<br/>
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From his office overlooking the runway at Gander International Airport, Reg Wright can see all flights in and out of his corner of Newfoundland. But in recent years, those plane spottings have been fewer and farther between. “In Newfoundland, we have a saying called the fisherman’s widow, which is typically anyone that keeps eyes to the sea to see that their husband will return. During the pandemic, I did spend a lot of time in the posture of looking out the window, counting numbers and wondering when recovery was coming,” Wright said. He’s still counting. The airport has lost four routes since 2019, including a WestJet route to Halifax, he said. “A third of our passengers have vanished into thin air …. By no means are we recovered.” Gander serves as a microcosm for numerous towns and cities across the country. While Canada’s total domestic passenger numbers now hover at around pre-COVID levels, air travel to smaller communities and even medium-sized cities has withered, pushing up fares and leaving parts of the country less connected. The 30 biggest airports in Canada have seen passenger capacity return to 98% of 2019 levels on average, according to the Canadian Airports Council. The next 30 are at barely 70%. Driving the travel rebound is a surge along big-city routes. Flight volumes rose 19% for Vancouver-Montreal, 12% for Toronto-Vancouver, 10% for Calgary-Vancouver and a whopping 51% for Ottawa-Calgary over the past five years, according to figures provided by aviation data firm Cirium. Correspondingly, airfares fell between 2 and 11% on those routes despite rampant inflation and widespread fare increases.<br/>
Chinese airlines are gaining market share on international routes, industry data shows, as foreign rivals are deterred by weak China travel demand and rising costs and extended flight times because of the need to avoid Russian airspace. Foreign airlines, led by Western carriers such as British Airways and Australia's Qantas Airways, are pulling services or opting not to restart flights to China after the pandemic, whereas Chinese airlines are expanding overseas operations. The proportion of international flights to and from China operated by the country's carriers is higher than before COVID-19 grounded much of global aviation and continues to rise. British Airways said on Thursday it would halt flights from London to Beijing for a year from late October for commercial reasons and last month suspended one of its twice daily London-Hong Kong flights for the same period. Since the outbreak of war in Ukraine in 2022, Chinese carriers have continued to take shorter northern routes to Europe and North America over Russia's vast airspace. In contrast, airlines in Europe, the U.S. and other countries have been banned from Russian airspace by Moscow or their own governments or choose not to overfly out of safety concerns. That has expanded the cost advantage held by Chinese airlines and allowed them to take a larger share in the international market at a time when fierce competition on domestic routes has put pressure on ticket prices and profitability.<br/>
A recent surge in GPS “spoofing”, a form of digital attack which can send commercial airliners off course, has entered an intriguing new dimension, according to cybersecurity researchers: The ability to hack time. There has been a 400% surge in GPS spoofing incidents affecting commercial airliners in recent months, according to aviation advisory body OPSGROUP. Many of those incidents involve illicit ground-based GPS systems, particularly around conflict zones, that broadcast incorrect positions to the surrounding airspace in a bid to confuse incoming drones or missiles. “We think too much about GPS being a source of position, but it's actually a source of time,” Ken Munro, founder of Pen Test Partners, a British cybersecurity firm, said during a presentation at the DEF CON hacking convention in Las Vegas on Saturday. “We're starting to see reports of the clocks on board airplanes during spoofing events start to do weird things." In an interview with Reuters, Munro cited a recent incident in which an aircraft operated by a major Western airline had its onboard clocks suddenly sent forward by years, causing the plane to lose access to its digitally-encrypted communication systems. The plane was grounded for weeks while engineers manually reset its onboard systems, said Munro. He declined to identify the airline or aircraft in question. In April, Finnair temporarily paused flights to the eastern Estonian city of Tartu due to GPS spoofing which Tallin blamed on neighboring Russia. GPS, short for Global Positioning System, has largely replaced expensive ground devices that transmit radio beams to guide planes towards landing. However, it is also fairly easy to block or distort GPS signals using relatively cheap and easy to obtain parts, and limited technological knowledge.<br/>
Boeing’s new CEO Kelly Ortberg said on Thursday he would be based in the planemaker’s birthplace Seattle, moving closer to the factory floor to rein in a safety crisis. Ortberg's confirmation of earlier reports that he would move to Puget Sound, Washington, rather than Boeing's corporate headquarters in Washington D.C., follows months of pressure on the company to reconnect with its industrial roots after missing bolts led to a door plug falling off a 737 MAX jet in mid-air in January. Ortberg, 64, will spend part of Thursday, his first day on the job, meeting workers who produce the company's strong-selling 737 MAX jet at a factory in the Seattle suburb Renton, as he faces the steep task of "restoring trust," according to a message to employees. "Because what we do is complex, I firmly believe that we need to get closer to the production lines and development programs across the company," he wrote in the letter. The former boss of aerospace company Rockwell Collins, now part of RTX, will also talk to suppliers, government officials and regulators. The planemaker is bleeding cash and beset by problems expected to take years to fix. MAX production and deliveries have slowed following the Jan. 5 mid-air panel blowout on a near-new model, while output of the 787 Dreamliner is now less than five per month due to supply-chain problems.<br/>
China flew its biggest-yet unmanned cargo aircraft designed for civilian use, as the world's top drone-making nation steps up test flights of autonomous aerial vehicles (UAVs) that could ultimately ferry everything from takeouts to people. Packing a payload capacity of 2 metric tons, the twin-engine aircraft took off on Sunday on an inaugural flight, state media said, citing developer Sichuan Tengden Sci-tech Innovation Co., for a trip of about 20 minutes in southwestern Sichuan province. China's civilian drone makers are testing larger payloads as the government pushes to build a low-altitude economy, with the aviation regulator seeing a 2t yuan ($279b) industry by 2030, for a four-fold expansion from 2023. With a wingspan of 16.1 m and a height of 4.6 m, the aircraft, built entirely by government-funded Tengden, is slightly larger than the world's most popular light aircraft, the four-seat Cessna 172. Tengden's test flight followed the maiden flight in June of HH-100, a cargo drone developed by Aviation Industry Corp of China (AVIC) with payload capacity of 700 kg and a flight radius of 520 km. Next year, AVIC plans to test its biggest cargo drone, the TP2000, which can carry up to 2 tons of cargo a distance of 2,000 km. In a report this year, the government identified the low-altitude economy as a new growth engine for the first time, with vertical mobility seen as a "new productive force" in areas such as passenger transport and cargo deliveries. In April, aviation authorities issued a production certificate to UAV maker EHang Holdings, based in the southern city of Guangzhou, for its passenger-carrying drone, China's first such document for an autonomous passenger drone.<br/>