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Air Canada is threatening to walk away from its plan to buy up to 75 CSeries jets from Bombardier unless the federal govt gives it more flexibility over where it does its maintenance work. In testimony that appears to contradict the airline’s claims that politics had nothing to do with its decision to order the CSeries, an executive told a Senate committee reviewing changes to the legislation that governs Air Canada that it won’t buy the aircraft unless the govt gives it more latitude. “The point around this is that we are not prepared to make that scope of a financial commitment in an environment of legal uncertainty,” Kevin Howlett, Air Canada’s senior VP of govt affairs and regional markets, told the Senate’s transport and communications committee this week. <br/>

Air India, which has long been struggling to shape up its performance, has decided that 130 of its flight attendants who were identified as overweight and failed to get in shape despite repeated warning will have to be grounded. Most of these 'overweight' cabin crew members are women. The DGCA has turned down a proposal by the airline to retain "overweight" cabin crew. The DGCA has said that weight norms cannot be rolled back because they have been prescribed on "technical and efficiency grounds". Air India now wants to either ground the cabin crew members who do not meet the weight standards or ask them to opt for voluntary retirement. In May 2014, the DGCA issued a circular directing all domestic airlines, giving them an 18-month deadline, to classify flight attendants as "normal", "overweight" or "obese". <br/>