Some airlines risk failure if they do not cut carbon emissions quicker in the next three to five years due to a mismatch between short-term corporate travel targets and the airline industry’s 2050 net zero target, an industry report said. Airlines are also at a rising risk of shareholder activism at a time when major fund managers such as BlackRock Inc, Vanguard Group Inc and State Street Corp have publicly expressed concerns about climate change, the report from CAPA Centre for Aviation and Envest Global released on Wednesday said. “The pressure from customers and governments and investors is going to probably demand an acceleration of the journey to net zero, which is clearly going to put pressure on airlines,” said David Wills, advisory executive director at Australian carbon reduction strategy firm Envest. “The conditions are right for airlines who get it wrong to find themselves in a potential failure situation,” he added. Several companies, such as HSBC Holdings plc, Zurich Insurance Group Ltd, Bain & Company and S&P Global Inc, have already announced plans to quickly cut business travel emissions by as much as 70%. Qantas Airways CE Alan Joyce said last week that his airline was developing a 2030 emissions target. “Our view is that smart airlines will pivot to reinforcing not only 2050 but enhancing their definitive views on 2030, because they will be looking to engage with their corporate customers more,” said Brett Mitsch, Envest’s executive director of investment. The CAPA/Envest report found the top quartile of 52 global airlines examined emitted an average of 30% less per passenger kilometre flown in 2019 than those in the bottom quartile.<br/>
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Environmental group Greenpeace called on the EU to ban short flights on routes where a train journey under six hours was available, in a sign of growing pressure on governments to take bolder steps to avert climate disaster. More than a third of the 150 busiest short-haul routes within the EU have a viable rail alternative with journey times that meet the test, including popular hops like Paris-Amsterdam, Madrid-Barcelona and Munich-Berlin, according to research published Wednesday, just days ahead of the COP26 climate summit. Links to non-EU states like the U.K., Norway and Switzerland provide added opportunities to displace flying, said the report from Greenpeace and the OBC-Transeuropa think tank. The demands come days before delegates gather in Glasgow, Scotland, for talks aimed at staving off catastrophic climate change. Greenpeace is seeking more government funding to improve rail infrastructure, make traveling by train cheaper and revive under-used routes including night trains. Reducing air traffic is essential to making rapid cuts in carbon-dioxide emissions, the group said. Greenpeace is also lobbying for an end to policies that lower the price of airline tickets, such as kerosene and value-added tax exemptions, to help put rail travel on an equal price footing. Monopolies on many train services -- including those run by governments -- are another factor that tends to make trains more expensive. <br/>
Airports in the Italian cities of Rome, Venice and Bologna and on the French Riviera have teamed up to create a company to build and manage infrastructures for flying taxis, the companies said Tuesday. The infrastructure, also known as vertiports, will be used to deploy battery-powered aircraft that can take off and land vertically, offering a new way for travellers to beat traffic and hop between cities. Atlantia’s Aeroporti di Roma, Aeroporto di Venezia, Aeroporto Guglielmo Marconi di Bologna and France’s Aeroports de la Cote d’Azur said their company, called Urban Blue, will be open to other industrial, technology and financial partners for the gradual expansion of the project in Italy, France and elsewhere. Urban Blue will also partner with German flying taxi startup Volocopter and will be supported by investment fund EDF Invest, a shareholder of Aeroports de la Cote d’Azur, they said. The start of the vertiport operations in Rome, Venice and the French coastal city of Nice is planned by 2024, they said, but gave no financial details of the project. Marco Troncone, the CEO of Aeroporti di Roma, a unit of infrastructure group Atlantia, said Urban Blue was working with a “challenging but possible timeline, to allow Rome to be among the first cities in Europe to activate this type of connection”.<br/>
Heathrow airport lost more than GBP500m over the summer and said there were signs of improvement but it did not expect passenger numbers to recover fully for five years. The UK’s busiest airport on Tuesday reported “strong pent-up demand for travel” after the government eased some of its travel restrictions, including testing requirements for anyone flying into the country. A total of 6.3m passengers used the airport between July and August this year, just 28 per cent of pre-pandemic levels but an increase from 2.2m passengers in the previous three months. It is the first quarter of passenger growth since the crisis began last year. “We are on the cusp of a recovery which will unleash pent-up demand,” Heathrow CE John Holland-Kaye said. But with high fixed costs and passenger numbers still well below normal levels, the airport lost GBP516m before tax in the three months to the end of September, bringing its losses for the year to GBp1.4b. Heathrow said it did not expect passenger traffic to fully recover until 2026. “At least we are recovering. On our busiest days we are back to 45 per cent of pre-pandemic levels, that is something we were only dreaming of six months ago,” Holland-Kaye said. The major airlines that use Heathrow have also reported a rise in demand, but most are still expected to post heavy losses going into the traditionally weak winter months. The airport has proposed steep increases to its landing charges to help recover its GBP3.4b of total pandemic losses, leading to a bitter clash with airlines, which have called for the airport’s owners to absorb more of the losses.<br/>
Singapore will allow quarantine-free entry to travellers vaccinated against COVID-19 from Australia and Switzerland from Nov. 8, the city-state's aviation regulator said Tuesday. Singapore is slowly re-opening its borders and has expanded quarantine-free travel to nearly a dozen countries, including Germany, Canada, France, Britain and the United States, under its Vaccinated Travel Lanes (VTL) programme. Visitors can travel to Singapore under the programme if they have been fully vaccinated and tested negative in COVID-19 tests. Singapore has been reporting more than 3,000 daily infections in recent weeks, although most are asymptomatic or mild. Over 80% of Singapore's 5.45m population has been vaccinated. Last week, the United States advised citizens against travel to Singapore and raised its alert for the city-state to its highest risk level. Germany has also classified Singapore as a "high-risk area".<br/>
Starting next month, the nation's regional airports, which have been dormant since the COVID-19 pandemic began early last year, will resume international flights, as more people are getting fully vaccinated. According to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, it will gradually ease restrictions on international flights, which were imposed in April last year, and resume international flight services on a regular basis next month for fully vaccinated people and those with a quarantine exemption certificate. International flights will be available for foreign and Korean nationals abroad who have been fully vaccinated with Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca or Janssen, two weeks prior to entry to the country. Those granted quarantine exemptions can also board planes here after receiving quarantine exemption certificates issued by diplomatic establishments abroad for urgent and inevitable entry for business, academic, public or humanitarian reasons. The international flight services will resume at the end of November at Gimhae International Airport first, offering two routes to Saipan and one to Guam.<br/>
General Electric is aligned with "near-term" plans of both Airbus and Boeing to ramp up production, its CE Larry Culp said Tuesday. Culp, however, declined to comment on Airbus' plan to go beyond an immediate ramp-up and almost double production of its best-selling A320 jets by 2025. This plan has drawn criticism from engine makers and aircraft leasing companies about the risk of overproduction during a fragile airline industry recovery from the pandemic. "We will talk about those conversations with them directly behind closed doors," Culp said. "There is no need to have that conversation publicly at this time." In May, Airbus announced a firm target of increasing A320-family production from 40 planes a month to 64 by Q2 2023 and said it was asking suppliers to enable a "scenario" of 70 a month by Q1 2024. The planemaker also said it was investigating rates as high as 75 by 2025. Industry sources say suppliers have agreed to support the firm goal of 64 a month but have yet to reach agreement on supporting the higher rates, fearing that demand would fail to meet expectations. <br/>