Japan Airlines (JAL) said on Wednesday it plans to buy 17 more Boeing 737-8 aircraft to refresh its fleet. The order adds to a 2023 announcement that the company would buy 21 of the 737-8 planes to replace Boeing 737-800 aircraft serving mainly domestic routes.<br/>
oneworld
Malaysia’s government has given final approval for a Texas-based marine robotics company to renew the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which is believed to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean more than a decade ago. Cabinet ministers agreed to terms and conditions for a “no-find, no-fee” contract with Texas-based Ocean Infinity to resume the seabed search operation at a new 15,000-square-kilometer site in the ocean, Transport Minister Anthony Loke said in a statement Wednesday. Ocean Infinity will be paid $70m only if wreckage is discovered. The Boeing 777 plane vanished from radar shortly after taking off on March 8, 2014, carrying 239 people, mostly Chinese nationals, on a flight from Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, to Beijing. Satellite data showed the plane turned from its flight path and headed south to the far-southern Indian Ocean, where it is believed to have crashed. An expensive multinational search failed to turn up any clues to its location, although debris washed ashore on the east African coast and Indian Ocean islands. A private search in 2018 by Ocean Infinity also found nothing. The final approval for a new search came three months after Malaysia gave the nod in principle to plans for a fresh search. Ocean Infinity CEO Oliver Punkett earlier this year reportedly said the company had improved its technology since 2018. He has said the firm is working with many experts to analyze data and had narrowed the search area to the most likely site. Loke said his ministry will ink a contract with Ocean Infinity soon but didn’t provide details on the terms. The firm has reportedly sent a search vessel to the site and indicated that January-April is the best period for the search. “The government is committed to continuing the search operation and providing closure for the families of the passengers of flight MH370,” he said in a statement.<br/>
The Coalition and consumer groups have accused Qantas of cherrypicking data to invert the conclusion of a study when the airline argued against laws to compensate delayed passengers. On Monday the Qantas domestic CE, Markus Svensson, appeared before a Senate committee hearing into the Coalition’s proposed “pay-on-delay” bill, which seeks to adopt an Australian version of the scheme in place in the European Union. Qantas and Virgin Australia have long been opposed to it, and repeated their concerns at Monday’s hearing that it would not help reduce delays and cancellations and would instead inflate operating costs, which airlines would ultimately bake into higher air fares. Svensson repeatedly referred to a 2020 EU-commissioned review into the efficacy of its compensation scheme, which he told the committee “showed that clearly the scheme led to the cost being passed to the consumer, which is not a good outcome”. He told the Senate that he had experienced the scheme as a consumer when living in Europe for three years, and said: “I have nothing good to say about it. “I think a mandatory scheme or compensation scheme does not improve customer protection. I also know from all the studies that the EU’s done that it increases the cost. It hasn’t improved in terms of cancellations and delays.” But the 2020 review he referred to, which examined the effects the EU’s scheme between 2011 and 2018, concluded that the laws had resulted in a proportional reduction of delays that were within an airline’s control. <br/>