After striking labour deals with 2 of its unions last month, Southwest Airlines is back at the bargaining table this week with negotiators from its pilots and mechanics unions, 2 groups that have gone nearly 4 years without a new deal. Both groups are scheduled to begin separate meetings with Southwest Tuesday with a federal mediator present. Talks are expected to last through Thursday for both groups. For pilots, Tuesday’s meeting serves as a restart for a negotiating process that fell apart after a tentative agreement was overwhelmingly rejected by the 8,300 members of the Southwest Airlines Pilots’ Association in November. The union has since elected a new president and formed a new negotiating committee. <br/>
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Stelios Haji-Ioannou, owner of EasyGroup Holdings, said in a letter to the board of Fastjet that the airline was in breach of 2 clauses of a license agreement. Haji-Ioannou, who has been vocal in his opposition of Fastjet's management, said the carrier's chairman Colin Child had caused the company to be in material breach of the license agreement with EasyGroup, which owns the Fastjet brand. Haji-Ioannou said Fastjet had failed to inform EasyGroup about Fastjet's new "accountable manager" after the exit of former CE Ed Winter. Fastjet declined to comment on the matter. It had said last week that it was taking legal advice on another letter from Haji-Ioannou. Haji-Ioannou, who owns a 12.6% stake in Fastjet through EasyGroup, said in that letter that the carrier could go insolvent. <br/>
Norwegian is leasing an additional 25 new Boeing 787-9s for its growing long-haul operations. The new aircraft are scheduled to be delivered in 2018. With this new agreement, the company’s long-haul fleet will consist of 40 Dreamliners by 2020. “In order to offer customers more routes and make our intercontinental operation even more competitive, we are dependent on more brand new cost-efficient aircraft,” Norwegian CE Bjørn Kjos said. At present, Norwegian operates 8 787-8s and a single 787-9. Norwegian flew almost 26m passengers in 2015, a record figure for the carrier. It operates a series of transatlantic services from Scandinavia and the UK to the US, but efforts to begin operations from Ireland to the US with a new subsidiary have been stalled for more than two years at the DoT. <br/>
Major US airlines involved in antitrust-immunised joint ventures with foreign airlines should have “nothing to hide” from periodic US govt reviews of those JVs, JetBlue Airways president and CE Robin Hayes said. Hayes reiterated JetBlue’s call for the DoT to periodically review the transnational JVs in which American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines take part. He also highlighted JetBlue’s strong opposition to the proposed Delta-Aeromexico trans-border JV and insisted that, if approved, an American-Qantas JV should be revisited by DoT after 3 years. The US airline industry is “now the most concentrated airline industry in the world” and “exemption from antitrust laws” provides a “tremendous benefit … [to] 3 of the world’s largest airlines” at the expense of smaller US carriers such as JetBlue, Hayes said. <br/>
Oman Air recorded a net loss of RO86m (US$223m) in 2015, a 21.2% improvement over 2014. Full-year revenue rose 14.1% to RO466m. The carrier has been consistently loss-making, but is aiming to achieve breakeven at the operational level by the end of 2017. A major reason for the losses has been a steady expansion of the airline’s fleet, which stands at around 40, but is planned to reach 70 by 2020. Nine aircraft—2 787s and 7 737s—were delivered in 2015 and 3 new destinations, Singapore, Goa and Dhaka, were added to the route map. Frequencies on existing routes were also increased, with all 11 destinations in India now having daily or double-daily services. Oman Air chairman Darwish Bin Ismail Bin Ali Al Balushi said this increase in capacity led to ASKs growing by around 35% to more than 20.5b km. <br/>