Adrian is Auckland bureau chief for Aviation Week, based in New Zealand. He covers commercial aviation in the Asia-Pacific region.
Adrian was previously based in Aviation Week’s Washington office for nine years, writing for a range of the group’s publications and covering many aspects of the commercial aviation industry. He has won Australasian and international awards for his aviation writing.
Prior to joining Aviation Week in 2002, Adrian covered aviation industry and policy issues for two other publishing companies in Washington. He has also worked for newspapers in Texas and New Zealand, covering a wide range of topics. Adrian graduated from Auckland University with a degree in history and English in 1992.
Air traffic control providers from Iceland and Denmark are reporting new progress in deploying automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) networks that will provide coverage across large areas of the North Atlantic. Isavia has successfully completed key tests on a new ADS-B system in Iceland, while Denmark’s Naviair is close to awarding a contract for networks in Greenland and the Faroe Islands.
EU lawmakers are becoming increasingly concerned that European states will not fully implement cross-border airspace consolidation before a December deadline. The European Parliament has passed a resolution calling for the acceleration of efforts to form functional airspace blocks (FABs), which are a crucial element of the broader Single European Sky program. The FABs are intended to replace the complicated web of airspace boundaries with a small number of much larger blocks.
Hawaiian Airlines says that while demand in its core Hawaii-West Coast markets remains strong, a surge in capacity from its competitors on these routes is hurting yields. Although Hawaiian managed to increase its profit in the third quarter and boost operating margins, load factor fell 1.9 percentage points year-on-year to 83.3%, passenger unit revenue was down 5.7% and yield dropped 3.6%. Hawaiian CEO Mark Dunkerley says these declines were worse than expected mainly due to the hike in overall capacity on key routes to the West Coast.
