Air travellers faced a slow start to the work week thanks to the latest winter storm to disrupt flights. Most big airlines were waiving rebooking fees for the storm, which was affecting flights in the Midwest Monday. Nationwide, more than 800 flights had been cancelled and another 2,000 delayed as of 5:50 p.m. ET, according to flight-tracking service FlightAware. Those tallies had been growing since early morning as the storm pushed east Monday. Nearly 500 of those cancellations came at Minneapolis/St. Paul, easily the hardest hit airport on Monday. That accounted about 40% of the entire day’s schedule at the airport, a major hub for Delta. Chicago’s Midway Airport – a busy hub for Southwest – had nearly 50 cancellations. FlightAware showed most were on departing flights, with about 10% of Monday’s departures axed. At Chicago O'Hare, United was waiving rebooking fees for flights at its busy hub there, though disruptions were mostly minor. Delays were more of a problem than cancellations for fliers there. Disruptions were also being reported Monday at a number of smaller airports across the upper Midwest. Most big airlines had instituted flexible rebooking policies for flights at a number of airports across the upper Midwest and Great Lakes. <br/>
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Changi Airport saw a record 62.2m passengers pass through its doors in 2017, it announced on Tuesday. The full year figure - which extends the record 60m passengers announced on Dec 18 - is up six per cent from the previous year, Changi Airport Group said. The China and India markets led the growth with increases of 12% and 16%, respectively. This was aided by the opening of new city links in these two countries and increased flight frequency to existing destinations, CAG said. In addition, 10 new links have been created between Singapore and cities in China, with Hebei Airlines flying to Singapore for the first time serving Harbin, Shijiazhuang and Yantai. Four new destinations were also marked in India, with more frequent flights to Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai and Coimbatore on JetAirways and IndiGo. <br/>
Brazil’s Embraer continues to study an eventual return to the turboprop market after a 20-year hiatus but has no immediate plans to launch such a plane as it focuses on the latest version of its regional E-Jet series, a top executive said. Embraer said in September it was considering the development of a propeller-driven passenger plane, potentially returning to a segment dominated by the Franco-Italian ATR and Canada’s Bombardier. Experts say developing a turboprop would open a new front against arch-rival Bombardier, while giving Embraer options to address the U.S. regional market, where the smallest member of its upgraded E2 family, the E175-E2, faces union restrictions. But Embraer Commercial Aviation CE John Slattery said the project was on the back burner for now. “I continue to be interested in exploring the business case for a turboprop but I can assure you there are no immediate plans to launch any turboprop programme,” he said Tuesday. “Our focus now is exclusively on certification of the E190-E2, which will happen in the next few weeks, and the E195-E2 in due course, next year.” Nonetheless, Slattery said he continued to have a “small stealth team” working on the business case for a turboprop.<br/>
Bombardier Tuesday attempted to draw its Brazilian rival Embraer into a hotly contested trade dispute, two days before a U.S. agency will rule on whether duties should be slapped on American sales of the Canadian plane-and-train-maker’s largest jet. The International Trade Commission (ITC), which oversees US trade remedy laws, is to decide on Thursday whether to back a US Commerce Department recommendation to hit Bombardier’s 110-to-130-seat CSeries with a duty of nearly 300 percent on sales to American carriers. The case follows a petition by Boeing, the world’s largest maker of jetliners, which argued its business was hurt because Bombardier received illegal government subsidies and dumped the CSeries in the US through the 2016 sale of 75 jets at “absurdly low prices” to Delta. The case could raise tensions this week between the United States and Canada which are meeting with Mexico in Montreal to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Bombardier, which contests Boeing’s claim, is asking the ITC to consider Embraer’s E190-E2 as a competitor in the 100-to-150-seat market because of recent improvements to the new plane’s range. Bombardier wants the ITC to take the unusual step of reopening the record to consider a recent FlightGlobal article, which cites an Embraer executive saying the plane’s range has improved from 2,850 nautical miles to 2,900 nautical miles.<br/>