Aviation

Bloomberg Hong Kong’s air traffic declined last month as protests took a toll on the city. Hong Kong International Airport handled 6 million passengers in August, down 12.4 percent from a year earlier, according to figures published by the Airport Authority. It said the decline was mainly due to lower visitor numbers. There was also a “significant” fall in passenger ...

Bloomberg The UK aviation regulator is preparing for a possible collapse of tour operator Thomas Cook Plc ahead of a showdown with bondholders, the Times of London reported, without saying where it got the information. The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) is making contingency plans for the possibility of having to repatriate “hundreds of thousands” of passengers stranded abroad, the newspaper ...

Bloomberg The Philippines’ largest flight school is trying to bring more women into the cockpit to help meet a shortage of pilots in Asia. At Alpha Aviation Group’s campus in Pampanga province north of the capital, one in five of its 550 students each year are women, whereas only about 3 percent of the world’s pilots are female, founder Bhanu ...

Bloomberg India plans to conduct its own checks and demand simulator training for all pilots before Boeing Co’s 737 Max jets can fly in the country again, even if the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) were to clear the grounded jets, a person with direct knowledge of the matter said. India plans to start its own assessment only after the ...

Bloomberg Embattled Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd reported its biggest drop in passenger traffic in more than a decade after facing heavy backlash from China in the wake of its employees joining protests in Hong Kong. Hong Kong’s flag carrier and its Cathay Dragon unit carried 2.9 million passengers in August, down 11 percent from a year earlier, the company said ...

Bloomberg British Airways cancelled dozens of flights on Wednesday as it wrestled with the fallout from a two-day pilot strike. While more than 90 percent of services will operate as normal, the morning timetable is subject to changes as the UK arm of IAG SA works to get hundreds of planes and pilots back into position, the carrier said in ...

Bloomberg Boeing Co’s troubled 737 Max jets are unlikely to return to service until early 2020 as regulatory authorities in the US and Europe remain divided and the planemaker has yet to submit its finalised software fix planned for this month, according to Barclays. In a note lowering forecasts for the company, analyst David Strauss estimated the company’s free cash ...

Bloomberg Since taking the reins at Spirit Airlines Inc this year, Ted Christie has overseen a 38 percent share decline and a deteriorating financial outlook. But just wait for next year as the discounter steps up efforts to squeeze more revenue out of travellers. “Nobody’s satisfied with the performance to date and I am certainly among that group,” Spirit’s chief ...

Bloomberg China’s crackdown on Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd has raised questions about the government’s insider at the carrier: Air China Ltd. State-run Air China has quietly owned almost 30 percent of Cathay for more than a decade, giving the national flag carrier a ringside view of the Hong Kong airline’s worldwide operations. Restrictions imposed on Cathay by China’s aviation regulator ...

Bloomberg Kenya Airways Plc said it will cut flights in the next few weeks because cancellations, resulting from a shortage of pilots, cost the carrier an estimated $50 million annually. The airline has 435 pilots but requires 497, Director of Operations Paul Njoroge said in a letter to the Kenya Airline Pilots Association (Kalpa), a copy of which Bloomberg has ...