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Afghan airline Kam Air is struggling to resume operations after nine staff members were killed in a Taliban attack on a Kabul hotel at the weekend, a company director said Wednesday. The bodies of seven Ukrainian employees of the airline, among at least 20 people killed in Saturday’s raid on Kabul’s Hotel Intercontinental, were sent home on Wednesday. The other two Kam Air staffers killed were from Venezuela. Most of the other foreign staff have left the country, crippling operations. “We used to have 37 flights a day on average. We now have about seven,” said Ramin Youresh, business development director for the Kam group of companies. “Most domestic flights are cancelled because we don’t have the crew and we don’t have the airplanes.” Kam Air, one of three main Afghan airlines, provides links between major cities in a country where travel by road is often dangerous and unreliable. It also flies some international routes in the region. Kam Air had 62 expatriate staff, both pilots and cabin crew, who used the Intercontinental as their Kabul base. About 40 of them were in the hotel at the time of the attack. “Most of them have left, they’re in a bad way, they’re in shock. They need three or four weeks to recover, then decide if they are willing to come back,” Youresh said.<br/>

Southwest is pushing its supplier to fix customer service problems that emerged following a $500m upgrade of its outdated reservations system. The carrier is leaning on Amadeus IT to resolve issues with its Altea program that replaced Southwest’s 30-year-old, mostly home-grown technology. There have been at least five technical outages since August, with most of those blocking passengers from accessing the airline’s website to check in or manage reservations. “This is not something we’re casually taking and saying, ‘Oh it will be fine. Don’t worry about it.’ It’s something that we’re actively working,” Southwest president Tom Nealon said. While the problems aren’t widespread and don’t constitute a crisis at this point, he said, “it’s a hassle and it’s frustrating.” The carrier prepared three years for the transition -- its biggest technology update ever. Though the final switch to the new system was made in May, Southwest began using some of the new tools to book customers as far back as December 2016. A Southwest executive moved up a planned visit with Amadeus to January from February, with the service interruptions “on top of the agenda,” Nealon said. “The support structures and the support processes are, honestly, still being worked and reworked because we’re finding some things we weren’t catching,” he said. Altea, which helps manage airline flight reservations, inventory and departure-control capabilities, is used by more than 130 airlines worldwide. It began handling Southwest’s international flights in 2014. Amadeus competes with Sabre Corp. and Travelport Worldwide Ltd.<br/>

Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) says the carrier's turnaround is underway and has reaffirmed its commitment to the task. In a series of videos to staff on its Twitter page, PIA and CE Rasool Cyan reveal that in the last quarter ended 31 December 2017, the carrier reduced operational losses to $54.5m. In addition, sales revenues for 2017 grew 25% year-on-year. Cyan describes the figures as "a feat nobody expected PIA to do". "The last quarter of 2017 has witnessed improvement in all business KPIs [and] is demonstrating that PIA is moving in the right direction," adds the carrier. There was no mention, however, about the reported interest by the Pakistani government to privatise the state-owned carrier. As part of the turnaround, Cyan says that PIA has been recommissioning more aircraft that were previously in storage - some for as long as over 400 days - so that "[its] assets can earn value". "The mission is great, PIA needs to be revived, PIA needs to thrive as an airline. We need to take the Pakistan flag higher and higher."<br/>

China Express Airlines has secured approval for an IPO to expand its fleet, becoming the first regional carrier in China to launch an IPO. The Guiyang-based carrier plans to collect $215m to buy six Bombardier CRJ900 aircraft, three engines and build a flight training center. Launched in 2006, China Express set up five domestic bases, comprising Guiyang, Chongqing, Dalian, Hohhot and Xi’an. The company operates 26 CRJ900s on more than 70 domestic routes. Of these, 95% are regional routes, which account for 11% of Chinese regional routes. China Express has signed codeshare and special-pro-rate (SPA) agreements with China’s major carriers to provide regional services on major trunk routes. The carrier aims to increase transfer passenger traffic, currently at 15%. By 2020, China Express plans to introduce narrowbody aircraft and expand its fleet to 66 aircraft, comprising 50 CRJ500s and 16 Airbus A320s.<br/>

Starlux Airlines, a new Taiwanese carrier planned by former EVA Air chairman Chang Kuo-wei, is targeting to launch operations in 2020. In its newly launched website, the carrier says it started hiring its first batch of employees last August and has since set up an office in Taipei. This year, the plan is to apply for relevant permits and also undergo inspections and audits under requirements by the country's Civil Aeronautics Administration. In 2019, it will start to recruit pilots and cabin crew, as well as ground crew. Its website shows what appears to be a Boeing 777, painted in a white and gold Starlux livery. Its introduction emphasises a luxurious experience. It has previously been reported that Starlux could be a charter operator focusing on catering to premium travel demand. <br/>

Fierce competition has forced Air Seychelles to cut its Paris route, which generates 30% of revenue, as well as two Airbus A330s and an undisclosed number of staff under a wide-ranging restructuring plan. “It is important that we take these tough, but necessary steps at this time to safeguard the future of Air Seychelles,” tourism and civil aviation minister Maurice Loustau-Lalanne said. Etihad Airways’ equity partner Air Seychelles is making the changes in response to a “major influx” in capacity in 2018. Austrian Airlines, German leisure carrier Condor, Emirates Airline, Etihad Airways, Ethiopian Airlines, Kenya Airways, Qatar Airways, Sri Lankan and Turkish Airlines already serve the Seychelles. BA will launch London flights in March, followed by Air France from Paris in May and Swiss carrier Edelweiss Air from Zurich in September. Air Seychelles said this overcapacity from Europe will depress airfares, load factor and forward bookings on the airline’s 3X-weekly Paris service, which will end April 24. “The launch of competing air services from Europe to Seychelles will significantly impact Air Seychelles’ flights to and from Paris, which account for approximately 30% of total passenger revenue at the airline, making the route unsustainable in the long term. After considering all the options, we have taken the decision to withdraw from both Paris and Antananarivo [Madagascar] and refocus on our core strengths—our domestic and regional networks. Doing so will enable us to concentrate on more profitable areas of the business, while people in Seychelles will continue to have nonstop access to France and wider Europe through airlines that can operate at more efficient international scale than Air Seychelles,” interim CEO Remco Althuis said.<br/>

Controllers cleared a Hong Kong Airlines flight for take-off 30 seconds after allowing another plane to cross the same runway, then ordered it to abort, a report on last month’s near collision at Hong Kong International Airport stated. The preliminary findings of an ongoing investigation involving a Hong Kong Airlines passenger jet and a Cathay Pacific cargo carrier were published in the Civil Aviation Department’s serious incident bulletin on Tuesday. According to the report, the Hong Kong Airlines A330 aircraft was awaiting take-off behind a departing aircraft at runway 07R at 1.05pm on December 23. About 15 seconds later, a Cathay Pacific Airways B747 cargo plane that had just landed from Alaska on the same runway told aircraft controllers that it was approaching the taxiway J11 holding point, which was located at the departure end of the runway. The controller instructed the cargo plane to hold at the taxiway as another aircraft was departing from the runway but gave it clearance to cross a minute later at 1.06pm. The instruction was read back by the Cathay pilots. About 30 seconds later, the controller cleared the Hong Kong Airlines flight for take-off, only to be told by Cathay’s pilots that their aircraft was still crossing the runway. Story has more details.<br/>

Ryanair pilots’ unions demanded Wednesday a joint meeting with management, saying individual talks on a new collective bargaining system were not satisfactory, according to a letter sent by the European Cockpit Association.<br/>The letter dated Jan. 24, which was on European Cockpit Association notepaper and signed by 11 trade unions, also demanded that Ryanair commit by March 1 to introduce permanent direct employment contracts in accordance with the local laws of the country where staff are based. Ryanair, in a statement, refused the idea of meeting unions collectively. “Ryanair won’t be meeting with any collective group of competitor pilot unions,” it said, adding that such a grouping would have no legal standing or negotiating license. Spokesmen for the ECA and Irish trade union IMPACT declined to comment on whether the letter, seen by Reuters, represented their position. Ryanair stunned the European aviation sector in December by announcing plans to recognise pilot unions for the first time in its 32-year history in a bid to stave off a series of threatened strikes. Since then it has held meetings with a number of national trade unions on formalising the recognition and negotiating collective bargaining agreements. But the letter, addressed to Ryanair’s COO and chief people officer, said the airline was in several countries “de facto sidelining” the unions by “trying to push through each Ryanair base a unilateral, non-negotiated pay rise offer” with a number of conditions attached. Ryanair, in a letter in response to ECA on Wednesday, described those claims as “materially inaccurate”. <br/>

Former motor racing champion Niki Lauda may not have enough pilots for the planned relaunch of his Niki airline in March unless he offers attractive contracts, the head of the airline’s works council said on Wednesday. Lauda, who won the bidding for the insolvent airline he founded after months of legal disputes, has said he has secured 15 aircraft to restart the carrier under the name Laudamotion by the end of March. He told staff on Wednesday that everyone would get a chance to sign a new contract with salaries broadly unchanged, but did not elaborate on the conditions, employees who joined the staff meeting in Vienna said. After months of uncertainty, many of the nearly 1,000 employees have applied to other airlines such as Austrian Air and Eurowings, which began advertising for Niki staff weeks ago. “Around 90% of Niki’s 220 pilots are currently in an application process with other airlines,” works council chief Stefan Tankovits told journalists on the sidelines of the staff meeting. “(People) are still skeptical,” he said.<br/>

Latvia’s Air Baltic expects to buy more CSeries planes from Bombardier in the coming months, a senior executive said Wednesday. The airline in October said it was in talks for a further 14 CS300 jets in addition to 20 already ordered. “On top of the orders we have right now, most likely we will order more in the coming months,” CFO Vitolds Jakovlevs said.<br/>