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.
If history has taught the airline industry anything, it is that the greater the transformation a carrier attempts, the more pain it will have to endure to achieve it. Qantas Airways can certainly vouch for that. The carrier is engaged in a knock-down, drag-out fight with its largest unions over plans to restructure major aspects of its operation. Bitter labor feuds like these could become more common as other airlines around the globe consider the same kind of changes that Qantas is undertaking.
Taiwan’s ATM provider and Thales Australia have finished the nationwide deployment of a new ATM system, which has been introduced in parallel with a major consolidation of airspace and control centers. The system, based on the Thales Eurocat product, was inaugurated recently by Taiwan’s Air Navigation & Weather Services (ANWS). It will handle traffic domestically and in the Taipei Flight Information Region that ANWS is responsible for. The contract for Taiwan’s ATM upgrade was awarded in 2006.
Qantas Airways’ engineers union has announced a three-week halt to its industrial action campaign, but the carrier will continue with its planned grounding of seven aircraft due to a maintenance backlog. The Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association (ALAEA) says all overtime bans and rolling strikes are suspended with immediate effect. Union leaders say this is being done so the groundings won’t be necessary, and it urged the airline to use whatever overtime is necessary to reduce the maintenance backlog.
