BAA would demolish Terminal 2 and the Queens Building at London Heathrow and replace it with a single state-of-the-art facility capable of handling up to 30 million passengers annually as part of its vision to continue the badly needed transformation of the airport.
Singapore-based Tiger Airways announced it will launch service to Darwin in Australia's Northern Territory beginning Dec. 19, subject to government approval. The four-times-weekly service will be aboard a 180-seat A320 and will be the first low-fare service between Darwin and Asia. Fares will start at S$49.98 ($29.37) one way. "We are excited to launch new low-fare flights to yet another country in the Asia/Pacific region, making Tiger Airways the fastest growing low-fare airline in the region," CEO Tony Davis said in a statement.
Royal Jordanian started twice-daily service between Aqaba and Amman. LTU German Airlines will operate daily Dusseldorf-New York service in summer 2006. The carrier will increase frequencies to Vancouver and Los Angeles to thrice-weekly. Wizz Air will launch five-times-weekly Wroclaw-Dortmund service March 1.
Swissport Cargo Services and AirBridge Cargo will establish and develop a cargo hub in Krasnoyarsk in cooperation with KrasAir under a joint venture among the three companies. Swissport and AirBridge also signed a three-year global cooperation agreement. AirBridge is the scheduled airline subsidiary of the Volga-Dnepr Group and recently ordered two 747-400ERFs, which will operate from the new hub. According to the parties, the Siberian city "is ideally located for its proposed hub role, lying at the crossroads of numerous global air cargo routes."
AirTran launched daily nonstop service from Detroit to Atlanta and Orlando Tuesday. As of today, it is operating three daily services to Atlanta and a single flight to Orlando. It adds a fourth Atlanta flight Dec. 9 and begins a single daily Detroit-Sarasota flight Feb. 15. DBA started four daily Dusseldorf- Hamburg flights on Nov 7.
Gol yesterday began operating four-times-weekly service between Campo Grande, Brazil, and Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. Santa Cruz is the Brazilian LCC's second international destination after Buenos Aires.
Amsterdam Schiphol's new low-cost carrier pier opened Nov. 1 with easyJet, Thomsonfly.com, bmibaby, Jet2 and SkyEurope as tenants. Wizz Air joins Dec. 1. Initially, 20-30 daily flights will operate from Pier H, which has seven gates but no airbridges. The airport's seventh pier, it can accommodate a maximum of 64 daily inbound and outbound flights and was designed to handle around 8 million passengers annually. It was constructed in just nine months, Schiphol said.
German low-cost carrier Air Berlin will turn the tables on Ryanair and easyJet, which have been opening bases in Germany, when it launches a transfer hub at London Stansted Dec. 16 and begins operating domestic services within the UK offering twice-daily flights to Manchester and Glasgow.
A dedicated premium jet service concept between New York and Milan is slated to take off in February. Branded Milano Manhattan or MiMa Club, the service will use a dedicated A319 CJ with 48 seats operated by Italy's Eurofly. Travel is limited to MiMa Club members, who can apply to join via the Internet at mimaclub.com. Service will offered six days per week from JFK Terminal 4 to Milan's close-in Linate Airport.
FAA announced that it will deploy the Airport Surface Detection Model X at 15 major US airports beginning in January with Seattle-Tacoma International. Others are Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall, Boston Logan, Chicago Midway, Chicago O'Hare, Detroit Metro Wayne County, George Bush Intercontinental (Houston), Los Angeles International, New York JFK, LaGuardia, Newark Liberty, Reagan Washington National, Washington Dulles, William P. Hobby (Houston) and Minneapolis St.-Paul. Additional sites are being evaluated.
ATA Airlines announced it will be suspending service to and from Indianapolis, Denver and San Juan as of Jan. 10. The bankrupt carrier intends to maintain its headquarters in Indianapolis. "By making these adjustments, we improve our ability to achieve a profit in a shortened timeframe. In turn, this strengthens our position in creating an appropriate structure for successful emergence in early 2006," VP-Strategic Planning and Chief Restructuring Officer Sean Frick said.
Alitalia's external auditor, Deloitte & Touche, declined to approve the carrier's accounts for the first half of the financial year ended June 30 owing to a lack of sufficient detail about its planned €1.2 billion ($1.4 billion) capital increase. The carrier has yet to provide evidence it has reached an agreement with underwriters, according to Deloitte, whose statement was published on Alitalia's website.
Ryanair said it is bringing forward the launch of four of its 10 new routes from its recently announced 15th European base at Nottingham East Midlands due to record advance bookings. Service to Limoges, Bergerac, Wroclaw and Lodz will commence Feb. 7-8 rather than March 14-15.
American Eagle unveiled new direct service between Columbia, S.C., and Dallas/Ft. Worth. It will operate thrice-daily flights aboard 50-seat ERJ-145s. Qantas will offer another flight between Sydney and Los Angeles each Tuesday from Dec. 20 through Jan. 24, adding more than 2,000 seats. Air France introduced a 777-200 to its nightly Paris-Dubai service, increasing weekly capacity by 16%. The aircraft will seat 270 in a three-class configuration. AF's five-times-weekly daytime flights will continue aboard A330-200s.
American Airlines launched its first new international service from Terminal D at Dallas/Ft. Worth International Airport yesterday, flying nonstop to Osaka. The daily flights will be aboard 777s equipped with 16 first class, 35 business class and 185 coach seats. Osaka is AA's 33rd international destination from its DFW hub and its fifth nonstop route to Japan.
In 1920, the Australian states of Queensland and Northern Territory lent their names to a new airline that would grow to be, 85 years later, one of the premier air transportation companies in the world. Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Ltd., or Qantas, was formed in the years after World War I to serve the vast reaches of the Outback.
Dubai International Airport is gaining momentum as a world cargo hub. Year after year it moves upward in the Airports Council International ranking of freight throughputfrom No. 29 in 2000 to No. 22 in 2001, No. 20 in 2002, No. 19 in 2003 and No. 18 in 2004.
Airports are not all created equal, this is clear. This does not refer simply to available facilities but also must encompass market, the economic power of an airport's region. At the top are airports flooded with demands for slots and terminal space, carriers eager to crawl over their competition's corporate bodies to get in and stay in, believing their economic welfare depends upon it.
The presence of the A380 at the Dubai Air Show this month in Emirates livery says it all: The new Airbus "baby" will play an intrinsic role in Emirates' and Dubai International Airport's shared goal to become global players. Emirates Airline has ordered 45 A380s, two of which are freighter versions, and the Dubai Dept. of Civil Aviation, which operates DXB, is sparing neither cost nor effort to accommodate the 555-seater.
Aeroflot Russian Airlines will add a total of 50 flights from Moscow to Novosibirsk, Samara, Ufa, Kemerovo, Paris, Rome, Milan, Venice, Bucharest, Sofia, Zagreb, Belgrade, Geneva, London, Nice, Vienna (10 new flights), Beijing, Baku and Tbilisi in its winter schedule Oct. 30-March 26. Qantas is expanding its QantasLink regional network into South Australia effective Dec. 18.
Continental Airlines today will become the first carrier to inaugurate scheduled nonstop service between the US and India with the launch of daily flights between its hub at Newark Liberty International Airport and Delhi's Indira Gandhi International. It will use a 283-seat 777-200ER.
Delta Air Lines intends to fold its Song low-fare airline operation back into the mainline while introducing Song's customer-pleasing attributes, including live seatback television, MP3 music programming and leather seats, to at least 52 additional mainline aircraft. Delta also will add first-class sections to Song's current fleet of 48 757-200s, making the product more attractive to higher-yield business travelers who can use status and miles to upgrade to the front of the cabin, something they cannot do with Song's current one-class configuration.
Qantas subsidiary Australian Airlines, continuing to suffer from depressed traffic in the wake of the latest Bali terrorist attack, will suspend twice-weekly flights from Perth and Melbourne to Bali Nov. 10-Jan. 29. Thrice-weekly service between Sydney and Bali will continue. Norwegian will start a four-times-weekly Oslo-Madrid service beginning March 29 aboard 737-300s.
Deutsche Lufthansa AG purchased a 4.95% stake worth €170 million ($206.3 million) in Frankfurt Airport operator Fraport AG on Friday, strengthening its partnership with Europe's largest passenger and freight hub. Lufthansa said it plans to increase its holding to 5% in the short term. "Our stake in the airport operator will intensify our partnership with Fraport and lastingly strengthen our airline's position at the major Frankfurt hub," LH Chief Executive Wolfgang Mayrhuber said in a statement. The carrier accounts for approximately 60% of Frankfurt's traffic.
