Aviation

Bloomberg Indonesia’s Lion Air, one of the biggest customers of Boeing Co.’s 737 Max plane, is considering switching to Airbus SE amid plans to suspend existing orders it has with the US plane maker, according to a person familiar with the matter. The carrier is suspending delivery of four 737 Max jets it had on order for this year from ...

Bloomberg Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said he’s studying options for flag carrier Malaysia Airlines Bhd., including whether to invest more funds, sell it off or even shut the company down. “It is a very serious matter to shut down the national airline,” he told reporters at parliament. “We will nevertheless be studying and investigating as to whether we should shut ...

Bloomberg It’s the airport equivalent of road rage: You race to your gate on a tight connection to see the door shut and your plane inching backwards. One reason gate agents are so strict about that closed door is an airline metric called “D-0” (D-zero), which designates a flight that departs at exactly the scheduled time. The industry—and government regulators—rigorously ...

Bloomberg Boeing Co. Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenburg faces his biggest crisis yet following the second deadly crash of a 737 Max jetliner, prompting some airlines to ground the best-selling plane and sending the shares on track for their biggest loss since just after the 9/11 attacks. China ordered its carriers to ground all 96 of Boeing’s newest 737 model, ...

Bloomberg Thai Airways International Pcl, the nation’s flagship carrier, plans to buy as many as 38 new aircraft to help reduce maintenance costs after losses widened more than fivefold last year amid fierce competition and unpredictable fuel prices. The new aircraft, which are more fuel-efficient, would help trim operating costs and attract customers, President Sumeth Damrongchaitham told reporters in Bangkok. ...

Bloomberg Two months into 2019, Airbus SE has logged cancellations for 103 jetliners and garnered a grand total of four new sales — and those orders were for the A220 plane manufactured in Canada by Bomb- ardier Inc. The deal for the A220s — formerly the Bombardier C Series — with Pacific Ocean carrier Air Vanuatu represented Airbus’s only new ...

Bloomberg Environmental activists recoil for a reason when the super-rich fly private jets to forums that preach carbon neutrality. Airplane pollution levels really are going through the stratosphere and nobody seems to have a viable plan to rein them in. While energy generation and agriculture currently dwarf aviation’s 1.3 percent share of all human-caused greenhouse gases, emissions from air travel ...

Bloomberg The biggest losers in Airbus SE’s decision to wind down production of its A380 superjumbo may be taxpayers in France, Germany, Spain and the UK, where governments made a big bet on the plane by lending more than 3.3 billion euros ($3.7 billion) to build it. Airbus agreed to reimburse the loans, together with interest, but payments were tied ...

Emirates Business The International Air Transport Association (IATA) released data for global air freight markets showing that demand, measured in freight tonne kilometers (FTKs), decreased 1.8% in January 2019, compared to the same period in 2018. This was the worst performance in the last three years. Freight capacity, measured in available freight tonne kilometers (AFTKs), rose by 4.0% year-on-year in ...

Bloomberg A four-month-old Ethiopian Airlines Boeing plane en route to Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, crashed on Sunday, killing all 149 passengers and eight crew, the airline said in a statement. The crash is the second in five months involving a Max 8 after a Lion Air plane that had been delivered only 2 1/2 months earlier nose-dived into the Java Sea ...