Aviation

  Paris / AFP Delta ordered 37 of Airbus’ medium-haul A321 aircraft with a catalogue price $4.2 billion (3.7 billion euros) as the US airline seeks to quickly retire older planes. “The order for the A321s is an opportunistic fleet move that enables us to produce strong returns and cost-effectively accelerate the retirement of Delta’s 116 MD-88s in a capital ...

  Paris / AFP Jean-Marc Janaillac, head of French transport group Transdev, is likely to be nominated to head Air France-KLM on Tuesday following the surprise resignation of CEO Alexander de Juniac, French economic newspaper La Tribune reported. “According to our information, the group’s nomination committee which met on Friday decided to propose Tuesday to the Air France-KLM board the ...

  Berlin / AFP Germany’s Lufthansa has postponed until September a decision on the acquisition of Brussels Airlines following last month’s deadly attacks on the Belgian capital, the airline said. The delay would allow the Belgian carrier to resume flights in the wake of the suicide bombings that targeted Brussels airport and a metro station, leaving 32 people dead, Lufthansa ...

  Reuters Qatar Airways increased pressure on Europe’s Airbus over aircraft reliability, saying it had some “issues” with the A350 passenger jet, barely a year after it entered service. “We have some issues with the A350, which was expected because it’s a new programme. However, we feel that Airbus is losing steam in resolving these problems with the A350,” chief ...

  NEW YORK /AFP More unexpected costs in its huge refueling tanker program for the US Air Force and slower commercial aircraft deliveries dented Boeing’s first-quarter earnings, the company reported. Boeing took a $156 million charge for unanticipated costs in the KC-46 programme, pushing earnings for the quarter ending on March 31 down 8.8 percent from a year ago to ...

  Bloomberg Vietnam Airlines Corp., which sold shares in an initial public offering 17 months ago, expects to get them listed “some time later this year” after closing a deal with ANA Holdings Inc., Chief Executive Officer Pham Ngoc Minh said. The shares of the state-owned carrier may start trading on the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange, Minh said ...

  Bloomberg Deutsche Lufthansa AG, Air Berlin Plc and other airlines cancelled hundreds of flights in Germany on Wednesday as a strike by public-services workers at airports hobbled operations in Frankfurt, Munich and Cologne. Lufthansa eliminated 895 flights, or 60 percent of the services it had scheduled for Wednesday, Germany’s biggest carrier said in a statement. Munich airport, where a ...

  Reuters Saudi Arabia’s Flynas will decide on whether to order Boeing 737MAXs or Airbus 320NEOs before the start of the holy month of Ramadan, the airline’s chief executive announced on Wednesday. Paul Byrne told reporters on the sidelines of an industry event in Dubai that it had decided against a potential order of Bombardier’s CS300 aircraft because the plane ...

Bloomberg Qatar Airways could switch its order for Airbus Group SE A320neo jetliners to Boeing Co.’s 737 model if issues with the European aircraft’s Pratt & Whitney engines aren’t resolved by the middle of the year. Moving from the Pratt-powered variant of the revamped A320 to a version that uses engines from CFM International isn’t an option as those planes ...

  Bloomberg Saudi Arabia’s new state-owned discount carrier plans to build a fleet of as many as 50 aircraft by 2020 and will choose within weeks between narrow-body models made by Airbus Group SE and Boeing Co. Flyadeal will select either Airbus A320s or Boeing 737s that it will lease or obtain through a transfer of orders from parent company ...