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Boeing is set to deliver a 737 Max to United on Tuesday, the first delivery of the troubled plane since its grounding almost two years ago. The delivery was confirmed to CNN Business by two people familiar the with plans. It's an important milestone for Boeing, yet it's only the first step in a long path to deliver planes and restore much-needed cash flow. Boeing is sitting on about 450 Max jets it has built since the March 2019 grounding, which followed two fatal crashes that killed 346 people. The US FAA lifted its grounding of the plane on November 18, though most other aviation authorities around the world have yet to follow suit. The company has said it expects to deliver only half of those 450 planes by the end of 2021. While most of the remaining deliveries will be completed in 2022, some will not be cleared until the following year. Meanwhile, Boeing is scrambling to find new buyers for some of those planes. Boeing kept building the planes despite not being able to deliver them to customers, in part to ensure its supplier base was not wiped out by the Max grounding. But that caused a huge cash drain for the company, as it usually receives most of the payment for a plane upon delivery. A 737 Max typically sells for about $55m, according to industry experts. In United's case, to preserve cash the airline is planning to finance 100% of the cost of new aircraft for the foreseeable future and has arranged for $1.6b in financing to do so. <br/>

Air Canada will cutting more routes in Atlantic Canada starting in the new year because of a second wave of COVID-19 infections. Effective Jan. 11, the airline says it will be suspending until further notice all flights in Sydney, N.S., and Saint John, N.B., along with temporarily halting routes in Deer Lake, N.L., Charlottetown, Fredericton and Halifax. “This decision was not taken lightly, and we regret the impact on our customers and community partners, but it is increasingly difficult to continue to operate in this challenging environment, without specific financial support from government, with whom continue to wait for negotiations to start,” said Peter Fitzpatrick, an Air Canada spokesman. The move comes after the country’s largest airline announced in June the indefinite suspensions of 11 routes in Atlantic Canada and the closure of stations in Bathurst, N.B., and Wabush, NL. Fitzpatrick said the most recent route cuts in Atlantic Canada represent a small subset of the 95 planned suspensions it announced along with its Q3 earnings results in November.<br/>

South Africa started a fresh battle with labor groups in its effort to revive the bankrupt state airline, offering three months of wages to employees who haven’t been paid since March. The government’s Department of Public Enterprises and the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa agreed to discuss the matter later on Tuesday, according to a spokeswoman for the labor group. Numsa and the South African Cabin Crew Association, another union, had expected members to be paid in full, in line with the country’s legal framework for a business-rescue process. Numsa can’t yet say if it will accept or reject the three-month offer for South African Airways staff, spokeswoman Phakamile Hlubi-Majola said by text message. “We can only say that the DPE must not forget that workers have made major sacrifices,” she said. The new flareup represents another barrier to South Africa’s plan to get SAA to fly again, about a year after the loss-making carrier first went into bankruptcy protection. While administrators published a rescue plan in June, the state has struggled to source the required funding and a search for an outside investor has been inconclusive. The effort has been made significantly harder by the Covid-19 pandemic. SAA hasn’t flown a commercial flight since March, when its fleet was grounded to help contain the coronavirus.<br/>

Singapore can play a critical role in distributing vaccines to the region as an air cargo hub, said the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore (CAAS) and Changi Airport Group (CAG) on Tuesday. “Over the years, Changi Airport has built a strong track record in pharmaceutical handling by air, from serving Singapore’s pharmaceutical manufacturing sector. We have good cold chain handling infrastructure and capabilities,” said Ho Yuen Sang, CAAS director of aviation industry. “We are able to handle not only vaccine shipments to Singapore for our own needs, but also transshipments to Singapore for distribution to the rest of the region.” Ho said that SIA has more than 200 passenger aircraft to deploy and can deliver vaccines to “multiple destinations according to demand”. Singapore can distribute vaccines to areas where the infrastructure to handle large volumes of vaccines is limited, which would require more frequent deliveries in smaller volumes, he added at a press briefing at Changi Airport on Tuesday. On Saturday, Singapore Airlines (SIA) said that it would prioritise cargo capacity to transport COVID-19 vaccines when they become available. The airline added that it would prepare seven Boeing 747-400 freighters and deploy passenger planes where needed. As of Dec 1, the number of weekly cargo flights at Changi Airport has tripled to more than 950 compared to end-2019, and the airport is connected to about 80 cities by weekly cargo flights, said CAAS and CAG. SIA now operates multiple weekly flights to key European pharmaceutical export hubs, such as Amsterdam, Brussels and Frankfurt.<br/>

Singapore's competition watchdog is seeking public feedback on whether a proposed cooperation pact between SIA and Vistara for flights to and from India could adversely affect passengers. The application for collaboration between the two airlines, submitted to the Competition and Consumer Commission of Singapore (CCCS) in November, could merge 16 routes that the two airlines now ply separately, including flights from Singapore to Indian cities including Mumbai, New Delhi, Kolkata and Hyderabad. Concerns that the reduction in flights could affect ticket prices and seat capacity can be submitted to the CCCS till Dec 21. Vistara is a joint venture between SIA and Indian company Tata Sons and began operating flights in 2019. The agreement between SIA and Vistara to work together on scheduling, pricing, selling, and marketing related to flights between Singapore and India was inked on Feb 13, before the coronavirus crippled the air industry. The CCCS said the two airlines argued that the cooperation is unlikely to distort competition on the 16 routes in question due to the many existing competitors already plying them. They said their passenger share, taken together, is still "not significant" compared to the overall number of passengers flying the routes on other airlines, and believed that it remains easy for potential competitors to enter the fray, given low barriers to entry to Singapore-India routes.<br/>