Aviation

Bloomberg Australians traveling for the Easter break are again anticipating hour-long waits as the nation’s largest airports and airlines continue to battle a staffing crisis. Sydney Airport has advised people traveling domestically to arrive more than two hours ahead of their scheduled flight — twice as long as usual — as it braces for 82,000 travellers to pass through its ...

  Bloomberg India barred 90 pilots from flying Boeing Co 737 Max jets after finding problems with a simulator they’d trained on to operate the aircraft, which the country cleared to fly again in August following a global grounding. A routine check of the simulator revealed deficiencies, and an investigation is underway to discover what caused them, Arun Kumar, chief ...

Bloomberg EasyJet Plc reiterated its plan to gear up operations to near pre-pandemic levels through the summer high season, as an easing of travel restrictions unleashes pent-up demand. Europe’s second-biggest discount carrier managed to narrow its estimated loss in a fiscal first half roiled by the rise of the omicron variant of Covid-19, and has now turned its focus to ...

Bloomberg German billionaire Klaus-Michael Kuehne has doubled his stake in his country’s flagship airline Deutsche Lufthansa AG, cementing his position as the carrier’s second-largest shareholder behind the government. KA Logistik Beteiligungen GmbH, controlled by the the 84-year-old Kuehne, doubled its stake in Lufthansa to 10.01%, according to a filing. The investor plans to be a “long-term, stable and reliable partner” ...

Bloomberg Understaffed airports and airlines from Australia to Europe are struggling to cope with a fresh rush of travellers, with long queues and flight disruptions expected to persist as the busy Easter weekend approaches. The aviation industry axed hundreds of thousands of workers to get through the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic. That left airports and airlines short of staff ...

Bloomberg Travel disruption continued to hit UK holidaymakers as officials warned of expected queues at airports later in the week and motorists faced fuel shortages. Both EasyJet Plc and British Airways had more cancellations, though the airlines said those flights had been called off in advance. According to FlightAware data, British Airways canceled 7% of flights today and delayed 19%. ...

  Bloomberg Sichuan Airlines Corp suspended one of its employees after contentious comments he posted online were unearthed, highlighting growing jitters in China after a deadly air crash last month. An internet user took to Weibo to ask the carrier to prevent the staff member in question — identifiable as an ethnic Mongolian Chinese national called Ayingga — from flying ...

  Bloomberg London’s Heathrow airport will ramp up hiring “as fast as possible” after passenger numbers surged last month to the highest since the Covid-19 pandemic began. The 4.2 million travellers passing through the facility during March represents a more than seven-fold jump from a year earlier, according to a statement on Monday. The hub, once Europe’s busiest, is racing ...

  Bloomberg Spirit Airlines Inc will hold talks with JetBlue Airways Corp over its $3.6 billion cash takeover bid that’s threatening to disrupt a pending combination between Spirit and rival deep discounter Frontier Group Holdings Inc. JetBlue’s offer could lead to a superior proposal, Spirit said in a statement after assessing the bid with financial and legal advisers. JetBlue’s unsolicited ...

Bloomberg Deutsche Lufthansa AG has about 10 billion euros ($11 billion) more debt because of the coronavirus pandemic, according to CEO Carsten Spohr. “That’s the price tag,” Spohr said in an interview with newspaper Schweiz am Wochenende. “It was expensive.” The German carrier hopes that its Swiss airline will pay back its pandemic-related government-backed loans by the end of the ...