Aviation

Bloomberg The $2 billion that the US Air Force wants to spend this fiscal year for the new B-21 bomber would go towards added staffing for contractor Northrop Grumman Corp., software development and producing detailed engineering drawings, according to a top service official. While the items listed by Air Force Undersecretary Matt Donovan were predictable for early work on a ...

Bloomberg JetBlue Airways Corp.’s plan to add more seats to its Airbus SE A320 planes is running into an obstacle: broken toilets. The Space Flex lavatories supplied by Zodiac Aerospace are crucial to JetBlue’s plan to reconfigure its fleet of A320 jets. The airline will set a “formal review” in November with Airbus and Zodiac to evaluate repairs on the ...

Bloomberg Boeing Co. is investing in Pittsburgh-based Near Earth Autonomy, a self-guided drone startup, marking its first financial backing for a company specialising in autonomous technology since establishing the HorizonX venture fund in April. Boeing, the world’s largest aerospace company, declined to specify the size of the investment. Near Earth Autonomy authorized the sale of about $10 million in equity, ...

Bloomberg The Pentagon is accelerating production of Lockheed Martin Corp.’s F-35 jet even though the planes already delivered are facing “significantly longer repair times” than planned because maintenance facilities are six years behind schedule, according to a draft audit. The time to repair a part has averaged 172 days—“twice the programme’s objective”—the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s watchdog agency, found. The ...

Bloomberg Ryanair Holdings Plc’s pilot uprising shows little signs of abating, with an ad-hoc group demanding that a wage increase offered to crews at London Stansted airport be doubled and extended across the budget airline’s European bases. The unofficial European Employee Representative Council made the proposal to pilots after cockpit crews at Ryanair’s biggest base rejected the existing offer, according ...

Bloomberg PT Garuda Indonesia is targeting a return to profit next year after a loss in 2017 as the flag carrier works to reduce expenses and operations improve. The airline is predicting a profit of $75 million in the second half ending December but won’t be able to post a profit for the 12-month period following a larger loss in ...

Bloomberg Securing a “made-in-US” label for Bombardier Inc.’s C Series jet by building another assembly line in Alabama would cost only “a few hundred million dollars,” Airbus SE’s No. 2 executive said. The new facility is crucial to Airbus’s strategy for increasing US sales of the Canadian plane while avoiding stiff trade penalties imposed by the Trump administration. Bombardier projects ...

Bloomberg JetBlue Airways Corp. has withdrawn its flights from a dozen online travel sites in the first phase of a broader effort to trim $20 million from its ticket-selling expenses. JetBlue is remaining with larger agencies including Priceline.com and Expedia Inc., along with Expedia’s Travelocity.com and Orbitz.com units. The airline favours sites like Kayak Software Corp.’s Kayak.com where consumers can ...

Bloomberg In the span of a one-hour conference call, Wall Street’s confidence in the leadership of United Airlines plummeted. Analysts pressed Chief Executive Officer Oscar Munoz and President Scott Kirby on how they planned to deal with rising costs and falling pricing power. Would they rein in growth in the face of fare weakness? Provide more detail on revenue initiatives? ...

Bloomberg Airports are the gateway through which we escape our daily drudgery. They allow us to wing our way to vacations, family reunions, even business junkets. But tainting every trip is the prospect of stress and frustration that comes with negotiating an infrastructure that envelops us from fare shopping to seat belt-click. There’s the ticketing counter, the kiosks, the bag ...