general

Intensified Israeli air strikes in southern and eastern Lebanon have created a surge in people desperate to leave the increasingly dangerous areas. Trapped in an escalating conflict, thousands of residents are struggling to flee the violence, which has already claimed more than 700 lives and left more than 100,000 displaced. The strikes, which have obliterated infrastructure and disrupted communications, have prompted around 118,000 people to move to safer areas, despite diminishing options. The air strikes follow previous Israeli attacks in which thousands of pagers and walkie talkies owned by Hezbollah blew up, killing dozens and injuring thousands. Mira Ali, a travel agent in Beirut told The National that she is working around the clock to get tickets for customers fleeing the conflict as well as those trapped outside the country. “It is chaos,” Ali said. “I have many people calling me to get them a ticket out of Beirut and I can’t accommodate them as all airlines suspended their flights. The only operating airline now is Middle East. I also have customers trapped in Turkey. They were away on vacation or for a business trip." An alternative option, said Ms Ali, was to cross the land border to Syria, or to head to the port in Tripoli to book a ferry to Mersin in Turkey. “There are boats to either Turkey or Cyprus. People who want to go to Cyprus need to have a visa while people going to Turkey can get a visa on arrival,” she added. Iraqi Airways was the latest airline to suspend flights to Lebanon until further notice, stating on social media that the cancellation of the route was due to the "deteriorating situation in Lebanon".<br/>

IATA director general Willie Walsh has criticised the European Union’s approach to sustainability, accusing the bloc of damaging the competitiveness of its airlines. “The EU is not the model to follow,” he said during a panel discussion at the association’s World Sustainability Symposium in Miami on 24 September. “We should look at what they are doing and not make the same mistakes they are making.” Walsh highlights a recently published European Commission report on the region’s competitiveness from Mario Draghi, the former European Central Bank president, which echoes some his concerns on the impact of current policies on airlines. “The competitiveness of the EU is being undermined,” Walsh says. Among its findings, Draghi’s report highlights the European Trading System for carbon credits as carrying a risk of “business diversion” from EU hubs to others where such costs are not mandated, while it also says the EU should do more to “de-risk and finance decarbonisation” when it comes to sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) in particular, contrasting the bloc’s policies with the positive impact of the Inflation Reduction Act in the USA. “The EU needs to start building a supply chain for alternative fuels, or the costs of meeting its targets will be significant,” Draghi writes. Citing the report, Walsh says: “We should learn from the mistakes they are making, because they are making big mistakes.” Speaking on the same panel, the CE of European low-cost carrier Vueling, Carolina Martinoli, concurs with Walsh, saying of SAF production: “There was a belief that a mandate would be enough to develop this industry and that’s just not happening – it’s not enough. “Without incentives, without guarantees to investors, it’s not going to happen.”<br/>

Milan council has appealed against a “grotesque” move to rename the city’s main airport after the scandal-tainted late former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. The council approved a resolution to take the case to the Lombardy region’s administrative court after the initiative to rename Malpensa was accelerated by Matteo Salvini, the transport minister in Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government. Salvini has been pushing for the airport to be named after Berlusconi since the billionaire media magnate’s death in June last year and approved the plan this summer after it was given the green light by Enac, Italy’s civil aviation authority. There is normally a mandatory 10-year wait after a person’s death before a public place can be named after them. Milan’s mayor, Giuseppe Sala, claimed Salvini had made the move without involving SEA, the company that manages the airport, or the local councils in its vicinity. He also accused Enac of succumbing to pressure from rightwing politicians. The leader of the centre-left Democratic party in Lombardy, Pierfrancesco Majorino, said Milan’s council had made “an important and unforeseen choice”.<br/>

More than 12.8m travellers across the globe were entitled to compensation following a summer of flight disruptions, with one-fifth of them UK passengers, according to new research. This summer saw a large amount of air travel chaos, such as the UK flight industry being hit by mass airport staff strikes after a series of planned walkouts occurred over shift pattern dissatisfaction and pay. Thousands of passengers were also hit by one of the largest global IT outages ever in late July, with around 100,000 estimated to have had their flights disrupted by the IT outage over one weekend, with major airlines such as British Airways and easyJet cancelling or grounding flights at Heathrow. Travel technology company AirHelp has revealed that during this chaotic period, almost half (42%) of the 78m total passengers who departed or arrived in the UK between June and August this year experienced disruptions. This is around 33m travellers in total running into issues with their flights, with a further 3m people having their flights cancelled and 872,000 passengers missing their connecting flights. Out of the 12.8m passengers across the globe who are entitled to compensation, 2.4m of these travellers were from the UK. Along with strikes and outages, large weather events such as hurricanes were among some of the biggest factors that have hindered air traffic itineraries across the globe. The airport that experienced the highest number of passengers eligible for compensation was those flying from London Heathrow at 263,000, while the month of August had the highest volume of passengers eligible at 843,000.<br/>

Airline and tour operator Jet2 is set to offer flights and package holidays to five new destinations from Bournemouth Airport. The flights will start from summer 2026 and serve tourist destinations in Croatia, Spain, Italy and Greece. Jet2 said it would base a third aircraft at Bournemouth to accommodate the new flights to Dubrovnik, Reus, Malaga, Verona and Kos. Managing director of Bournemouth Airport Steve Gill said the new flights offered holiday makers "choice, flexibility, and convenience". "We are hugely excited about the positive impact this expansion will have for both the airport, passengers and the local economy,” he added. The Malaga service will take off three times a week, with the other new flights operating weekly. Ryanair already operates between Bournemouth and the Spanish resort. The airport announced in August that it had experience a 25% growth in passenger numbers and surpassed 2019 pre-pandemic levels for the first time.<br/>

India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) is investigating a serious incident of “airprox” or aircraft proximity — flights coming closer than the mandated minimum separation while airborne —in which two wide-body aircraft belonging to Qatar Airways and Israel’s EL AL were involved. The incident occurred on March 24 at 35,000 feet over the Arabian Sea and the two aircraft came as close as 9.1 nautical miles, or around one minute of each other, even as the regulation separation for the area was 10 minutes. The AAIB has released a preliminary report with details of the incident and the investigation process. The final investigation report is likely to be released within a couple of months, per sources in the know. Airprox is a situation in which the distance between aircraft as well as their relative positions and speed have been such that the safety of the aircraft involved may have been compromised. It is not clear yet whether the aircraft involved in this incident were on a collision course. Airprox incidents are classified into three categories—serious risk of collision, safety of the aircraft may have been compromised, and no risk of collision. Although both the aircraft were not headed to or from India, the AAIB is conducting the investigation as the area where the incident occurred falls under the Mumbai Flight Information Regions (FIR) where air traffic services are managed by the Mumbai air traffic control (ATC). While the probe is underway, two air traffic controllers on duty at the time of the incident were off-rostered as per the protocol in such cases and sent for corrective training, per sources.<br/>

More Chinese are headed to Europe and other far-flung hotspots during the Golden Week holiday that sees hundreds of millions in the country on the move, in the most robust signs of a travel rebound since the country re-opened its borders. Bookings for overseas flights and hotels have spiked from last year’s holiday week, with international flight reservations doubling and Europe showing some of the the biggest growth, according to Qunar and Trip.com, among the biggest online travel agencies in China. Overseas car rental bookings have surged by more than 150% from 2023, while cruise vacations have spiked seven-fold, according to Fliggy, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s travel unit. Asian destinations from Japan to Malaysia are favored during the week-long holiday that starts Oct. 1, while some of the fastest-growing bookings are to long-haul spots including Belgium, Croatia, Nordic countries as well as the United Arab Emirates. “We expect an October Golden Week that will come closer than any previous Chinese holiday period since the country’s reopening to meeting pre-pandemic levels,” according to a report by Dragon Trail International, which tracks travel sentiment and trends in the country. The recovery of overseas tourism from China is a critical metric for the global travel industry. Chinese holidaymakers, known for outspending tourists from most other countries before the pandemic, made 170m trips abroad in 2019 and spent almost 1.7t yuan ($242b) — making up 14% of global tourism spending, according to World Travel and Tourism Council data. While international travel from China hasn’t fully recovered, airlines have allocated about 1.6m seats on overseas flights from the mainland for Oct. 1 through Oct. 7 — about 20% below pre-pandemic levels, according to a Bloomberg analysis of Cirium flight data. Meanwhile, air ticket data from flight analytics firm ForwardKeys shows an even smaller gap for flight demand compared to 2019. Growth to some overseas destinations, particularly those with visa-free policies, is particularly striking, said Nan Dai, China market analyst at ForwardKeys.<br/>

Over the years, travelers have repeatedly been warned to avoid public Wi-Fi in places like airports and coffee shops. Airport Wi-Fi, in particular, is known to be a hacker honeypot, due to what is typically relatively lax security. But even though many people know they should stay away from free Wi-Fi, it proves as irresistible to travelers as it is to hackers, who are now updating an old cybercrime tactic to take advantage. An arrest in Australia over the summer set off alarm bells in the United States that cybercriminals are finding new ways to profit from what are called “evil twin” attacks. Also classified within a type of cybercrime called “Man in the Middle” attacks, evil twinning occurs when a hacker or hacking group sets up a fake Wi-Fi network, most often in public settings where many users can be expected to connect. In this instance, an Australian man was charged with conducting a Wi-Fi attack on domestic flights and airports in Perth, Melbourne, and Adelaide. He allegedly set up a fake Wi-Fi network to steal email or social media credentials. “As the general population becomes more accustomed to free Wi-Fi everywhere, you can expect evil twinning attacks to become more common,” said Matt Radolec, vice president of incident response and cloud operations at data security firm Varonis, adding that no one reads the terms and conditions or checks the URLs on free Wi-Fi. “It’s almost a game to see how fast you can click “accept” and then ‘sign in’ or ‘connect.’ This is the ploy, especially when visiting a new location; a user might not even know what a legitimate site should look like when presented with a fake site,” Radolec said.<br/>

A federal judge on Friday ordered a hearing next month over Boeing’s agreement to plead guilty to conspiracy in connection with the 737 Max jetliner, two of which crashed, killing 346 people. Families of some of the passengers killed in the crashes object to the agreement. They want to put Boeing on trial, where it could face tougher punishment. U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor set a hearing for Oct. 11 in Fort Worth, Texas. Boeing is accused of misleading regulators who approved minimal, computer-based training for Boeing 737 pilots before they could fly the Max. Boeing wanted to prevent regulators from requiring training in flight simulators, which would have raised the cost for airlines to operate the plane. The Justice Department argued in court filings that conspiracy to defraud the government is the most serious charge it can prove. Prosecutors said they lack evidence to show that Boeing’s actions caused the crashes in 2018 in Indonesia and 2019 in Ethiopia. Relatives of victims and their lawyers have called the settlement a sweetheart deal that fails to consider the loss of so many lives. Some of the lawyers have argued that the Justice Department treated Boeing gently because the company is a big government contractor. The agreement calls for Boeing to pay a fine of at least $243.6m, invest $455m in compliance and safety programs, and be placed on probation for three years.<br/>

The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) said late on Friday that its pay deal talks with Boeing had broken off and that there were no further dates scheduled for negotiations at this time. "We remain open to talks with the company, either direct or mediated," IAM said in a post on X. Boeing remains committed to resetting its relationship with its represented employees and wants to "reach an agreement as soon as possible," a spokesperson for the company said in an email. "We are prepared to meet at any time." More than 32,000 Boeing workers in the Seattle area and Portland, Oregon, walked off the job on Sept. 13 in the union's first strike since 2008, halting production of airplane models including Boeing's best-selling 737 MAX. The union is seeking a 40% pay rise and the restoration of a defined-benefit pension that was taken away in the contract a decade ago. Boeing made an improved offer to the striking workers on Monday that it described as its "best and final", which would give workers a 30% raise over four years and restored a performance bonus, but the union said a survey of its members found that was not enough.<br/>