All Ops & safety articles – Page 1249
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News
Iberia joins oneworld alliance
Iberia is finally cleared to join the oneworld alliance, having tied up agreement with American Airlines and British Airways on their acquisition of small minority stakes in the Spanish flag-carrier. Iberia also now appears to be on course to finish off the year with its long-awaited privatisation. Iberia's ...
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Ansett greets Star with fleet upgrade
Ansett Australia is upgrading its fleet to include Boeing 747-400s as it prepares for its entry on 28 March into the Star Alliance. In a surprise move, Australia's second carrier says it will lease two 747-400s for five years from new partner Singapore Airlines (SIA), when leases on two ...
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BA set to stay in red
British Airways' first quarterly loss in four years has triggered doubts over its grip on premium business markets and analysts expect further losses before things improve. Intense competition, particularly across the Atlantic, finally pushed the group into the red, resulting in a £75 million ($122 million) loss before ...
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Back to the future for Olympic
The encouraging noises that emanated from the management of Olympic Airways little more than 10 weeks ago have again faded as the the Greek carrier lost another managing director. The official line is that Theodore Tsakiridis resigned, but the speed of his departure bore the hallmarks of the political manoeuvring ...
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Beijing tightens its belt
The Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) may have escaped Beijing's directive that requires other agencies to divest their interests in the industries that they regulate, but aviation is not entirely unscathed by the latest belt tightening aimed at boosting China's weak economy and currency. Heading the list ...
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Brazilian carriers fight cash crisis
Brazil's major airlines, which are still suffering the consequences of a fares war last year, are now facing an economic crisis. Latin America's largest economy is in turmoil after the Real, the currency introduced in mid-1994 as part of a plan which successfully halted inflation, collapsed in ...
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News in Brief
EasyJet seeks listing - UK low-cost carrier easyJet has announced that it intends to seek a listing on the London stock exchange and the US Nasdaq market early next year, to finance the purchase of the new aircraft it has on order. A spokesman also said that easyJet would drop ...
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In need of a check-up
The systems onboard ageing aircraft in the USA are coming under closer scrutiny, raising the prospect of higher maintenance costs. In the USA, old aircraft don't die: they get hushkits and a new paint job. In stark contrast to their counterparts in Europe and Asia, US passengers routinely find ...
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Foreign ownership debate heats up
The debate in the USA over foreign ownership and control of airlines has come under a spotlight early in 1999 with airline and government officials discussing how a relaxation of the rules may occur. US Secretary of Transportation Rodney Slater stirred the controversy last year when he said the ...
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Double Standards
Airlines face a growing array of different and often divergent competition rules, as recent transatlantic cases have shown. David Knibb, a former antitrust lawyer, examines the issues. Antitrust authorities are positioning themselves as the new policeman of the world marketplace. And as they do so, they begin to replace the ...
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Duty free set for a reprieve
The European Commission's heavily trailed February report into the likely impact of its push to abolish duty free, ultimately conceded little ground to those attempting to save this lucrative market. The international Duty-Free Confederation (IDFC) and the Airports Council International (ACI) are both calling for a five-year transition period to ...
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Japan's majors face loss of slots
Low-cost start-up carriers appear to be having more of an impact on Japan's "big three" than expected and new rules are on the way that could erode their dominance on busy domestic routes. The "big three" - All Nippon Airways, Japan Airlines and Japan Air System - are ...
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Managing or flying?
It may be desirable to include pilots in airline management, but how far is it economic? Organisation of cockpit crews must rank among the airline industry's most sensitive management issues. And central to that debate is the question over the extent to which pilots themselves should be involved in ...
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Majors play the mating game
US carriers are again testing the water with a series of new acquisition proposals. Perhaps it has something to do with the season, but it is almost exactly a year since they last indulged in a frenzy of mating activity and the US majors are at it again. Only this ...
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Licking its wounds
Northwest Airlines had less to celebrate at the end of last year than most of its US competitors. Jane Levere examines the potential impact of last year's battles on this year's performance. For Northwest Airlines, 1998 will go down as the year it would rather forget. The effects of the ...
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Third Party Pressure
The third party maintenance, repair and overhaul business will consolidate further as the dominant companies seek greater economies of scale and airlines turn their attention back to improving costs. If you were asked to name the landmarks of the aircraft maintenance and overhaul industry over the past year, you ...
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US yields spoil the party
Despite a solid set of 1998 results, the US majors are nagged by doubts over yields. After all the pessimism, and the damage of the Northwest Airlines strike, the year-end figures from the US majors held little to complain about. That little something, however, was an overall fall in yields. ...
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Russia's AT traffic down again in 1998
Paul Duffy/MOSCOW Russia's air traffic fell by 11% to 22.4 million passengers during 1998, while revenue passenger kilometres (RPKs) fell by 9.7% to 55.475 billion. The Russian Federal Aviation Service's [FAS] annual report reveals the eighth successive year of falling air traffic. While traffic had been showing a ...
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CFM56 fault accepted under 'hazard ranking'
A serious mechanical fault that has occurred seven times in CFM International CFM56-3 turbofans between 1995 and 1997 has been calculated as an acceptable risk by the US and UK aviation authorities, a UK Air Accident Investigation Branch (AAIB) report reveals. The UK Civil Aviation Authority's acceptance of the ...
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Kitty Hawk beats 727F weight limit
US cargo carrier Kitty Hawk says the US Federal Aviation Administration has approved its alternative means of compliance on an FAA airworthiness directive (AD). The directive imposes severe payload limits on Boeing 727s that were converted into freighters by a number of third-party maintenance organisations. The AD affects ...