EgyptAir has confirmed that its only remaining Boeing 767-300ER has been damaged during a night-landing accident at Zimbabwe's Harare International Airport late on Tuesday. The jet was en-route from Johannesburg. A spokeswoman for EgyptAir in Cairo says 94 passengers were on board. None was injured. Reports suggest that the port wing of the 767-300ER dipped and that the engine was torn off as it struck the ground, after the jet skidded off the runway on landing during poor weather conditions. Airport officials could not be contacted. Lufthansa has asked Smiths Industries Aerospace to replace the Smiths-built flight management computers (FMCs) on its fleet of Boeing 737s. Although financial terms of the agreement have not been disclosed, Smiths confirms that it will perform a "multi-million dollar" upgrade, supplying 80 new FMCs to Lufthansa by March. US Airways says it will have no choice but to shut down operations completely if its flight attendants decide next month to begin a series of random strikes. In a clear threat designed to put pressure on the leadership of the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA), which represents US Airways' 10,000 flight attendants, the airline says that if it stops operating it may have to furlough many of its employees. The AFA said yesterday a series of random strikes would begin at the end of the 30-day cooling-off period in effect since negotiations between the union and US Airways management ended in impasse last week. Despite optimism over Belgian carrier Sabena's performance this year, both it and the two smaller airlines in the Sabena Group ended 1999 in the red. Sabena, whose turnover fell 4%, ended with a loss of BFr2 billion ($50 million). Sabena Technics was one of the Group's success stories of last year, increasing revenue by 16%. However, the turnover of the Sabena Group as a whole rose 3%, to nearly BFr90 billion, enabling management to take encouragement from the year.
Source: Flight Daily News
