Northwest Airlines will launch one daily nonstop flight between Minneapolis/St. Paul and Idaho Falls June 9. The service will be operated by Northwest Airlink partner Pinnacle Airlines Corp. using a 50-seat CRJ.
Emirates will expand service to Accra with two nonstop weekly flights from Dubai that will begin March 27. The flights are in addition to the four weekly services Emirates operates to Accra via Lagos.
Song launched a fare sale for its New York JFK-Los Angeles flights, which begin May 1. From now until March 17, the carrier is offering $99 one-way fares on the route. The flights are part of Song's expansion at JFK, which also includes new services to San Francisco and Seattle and to leisure destinations Aruba and San Juan.
Japan Airlines announced a host of new services to China. From July 1, its China-Japan network will expand to 13 cities in China served by 29 routes and 237 flights per week. When codeshares are included, the number of cities jumps to 20. The expansion begins March 27 when JAL will codeshare beyond Beijing to six additional cities with China Southern Airlines. These services will be dubbed JAL China Express as per the arrangement already in place with Hainan Airlines to two cities. JAL also has codeshare arrangements with China Eastern Airlines.
SriLankan Airlines unveiled what it termed a "radically revamped schedule." It will launch new daily return service from Colombo to New York JFK March 27 and will add two frequencies to Singapore for a total of 16 and to Kuala Lumpur for a total of 12. In addition, the airline plans to operate a total of 33 weekly flights to Frankfurt, Munich and Dusseldorf in partnership with Emirates. This summer SriLankan will begin daily A330 flights to Abu Dhabi with four of them continuing to Doha and three to Bahrain.
Southwest Airlines will extend its precedent-setting codeshare agreement with ATA Airlines beyond Chicago Midway to Phoenix. Currently, ATA operates two weekly flights to both Maui and Honolulu from Phoenix, but the service will expand to six weekly flights on April 3 and to daily service on June 7. Phoenix is Southwest's second-largest city, with 191 daily departures to 40 destinations.
Austrian Airlines will introduce service from Vienna to Varna, Bulgaria, operating five days per week. It also will serve the Romanian city of Sibiu in cooperation with Tarom. Both destinations will be added to the summer schedule. Austrian will add frequencies to several destinations throughout its network, including boosting weekly flights between Vienna and Shanghai to five and to New York to 11. In addition, it will launch seasonal summer service to Montreal. It will begin new flights to Alexandria and Amman, with each being offered four times per week.
EasyJet plans to boost service significantly from its base at Berlin Schoenefeld this fall with three new routes, which will bring to 27 the number of its routes from the airport. Under the expansion, the carrier will begin double-daily flights to both London Gatwick and Rome Ciampino and one daily flight to Milan Linate. All new flights will start Sept. 21. According to easyJet, Berlin is now its largest base outside of the UK, and with delivery of its 100th aircraft at the end of March, Schoenefeld will account for 10% of its total operations.
Coming this May, Disney in a partnership with ARINC and Baggage Airline Guest Services Inc. will take the "hold" out of hold baggage and put a zip in the trip to the airport for guests at its Walt Disney World Resort.
Bratislava would seem to be an unlikely place from which to launch an airline. The capital city of Slovakia has a population of around half-a-million (for the country as a whole it is 5.4 million) and is only 30 mi. from Vienna, home to Central Europe's largest carrier, Austrian Airlines.
Looking like a tiny abstract sculpture in the midst of the giant terminals of 21st century John F. Kennedy International Airport, architect Eero Saarinen's 1961 TWA World Flight Center sits empty on what Richard Smyth, JetBlue Airways' VP-JFK redevelopment, calls "the best ramp on the airport."
On top of that introduction schedule, engine manufacturers are assuming that follow-ons to the single-aisle 737NG/ A320 twinjets will be launched around 2010 to be in the market in 2012. This is the big-number category, with hundreds pouring out of factories every year even in down times.
Ready or not, the A380 is coming in 2006. "Airports will be ready," Dick Marchi, senior VP at ACI-NA, tells AE&T. "Most will be fine." The double-decker A380, which was rolled out in January, will carry up to 555 passengers more than 9,000 nm, while the freighter version will be able to haul up to 150 tonnes for more than 5,600 nm.
Last summer, 787 VP and GM Mike Bair talked of a "land rush" of airline orders and, along with Boeing Commercial Airplanes President and CEO Alan Mulally, repeatedly predicted that more that 200 787 orders would be on the books by the end of 2004. But even the late-January order from six Chinese carriers for a total of 60 787s left the company 14 short of its year-end target, while the number of firm orders remained at 56.
In the aftermath of 9/11 and responding to growing national as well as European regulatory demands for increased security at airports, Aeroports de Paris launched a trial of several biometric systems in an effort to improve the reliability of access pass control of staff entering restricted areas.
Lufthansa was forced to cancel 77 flights yesterday morning at Frankfurt affecting thousands of passengers amid heightened security owing to US President George W. Bush's visit to Germany. Bush landed at Frankfurt at roughly 8:45 a.m. local time on his way to talks with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder on the second leg of a three-nation tour of Europe. During his arrival, the airport was closed for about 40 min. "We could rescue all intercontinental flights, but we had to cancel 77 domestic and European flights, affecting 5,000 passengers," a spokesperson told ATWOnline.
Despite efforts by AirAsia to persuade the government to build a new low-cost hub at Malasyia's former main airport Subang, authorities instead have decided to construct a new terminal for LCCs at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. AirAsia CEO Tony Fernandes said he believes a new terminal at Subang would provide his airline with "the competitive edge against growing competition in the region," but government officials said building the terminal at KLIA will help the carrier.
There is an old handyman's saying, equally applicable in our era of programmable televisions and coffeemakers: "When all else fails, read the directions." To its credit, Delta Air Lines has become the first US legacy carrier to read the directions. Its domestic fare reform unveiled last month (see News Briefs, p. 9) belatedly acknowledges what business travelers, Wall Street analysts and just about everybody not employed in a network airline revenue management department have been saying for years-the pricing model is fractured beyond repair.
ABX Air selected Quint Turner as CFO. ACE Aviation Holdings appointed Montie R. Brewer president & CEO-Air Canada, Jon Turner VP-maintenance-Air Canada, Duncan Dee senior VP-corporate affairs & CAO-ACE, Bradley Moore president & CEO-Air Canada Ground Handling Services and Claude Morin president & CEO-Air Canada Cargo. Alaska Airlines welcomed Caroline Boren as MD-corporate & strategic communications.
Some weeks before the hectic holiday travel period, a British newspaper headlined an article on two of London's airports, "Wonder: Stansted airport . . . Blunder: Heathrow airport."
Of the lessons learned from the shocks that have jolted the airline industry over the past few years, perhaps the most valuable is the resilience of air cargo. Despite SARS, terrorism and avian flu, Asian airlines have managed to derive ever-increasing revenue--in one case, up to 48% of the total--from freight.
Reducing airline labor costs is usually fraught with turmoil, but curtailing fuel consumption is a task on which management and labor usually can agree. For those carriers with cash in the bank, a risk management strategy involving financial instruments may be the most complete-and rewarding-way to smooth out the peaks and valleys. When prices just keep rising, however, as has been the case over the past 12-18 months, even hedging has its limitations. And many cash-strapped airlines simply lack the funds to participate.
For a person whose largest customer is on the financial ropes, Riccardo Raimondi seems remarkably composed. The Executive VP-Aeronautical Activities of Aeroporti di Roma, which operates Romes two commercial airports, Fiumicino Leonardo da Vinci and much smaller Ciampino Giovan Battista Pastine, is confident that the continued health of the properties does not rest on the survival of Alitalia. Fiumicino is more than just an Alitalia hub, he declares.
The biggest airport in the US is getting bigger. With its 16,000-ft. sixth runway-the longest commercial landing strip in the nation-a year old, Denver International is starting on the first terminal expansion of its nine-year life. It will spend about $100 million to build an extension to Concourse A, chiefly for Frontier Airlines, and another $45-$50 million on better facilities for United Airlines' Regional operations at the end of Concourse B.
They won't have to move a mountain to build the grand new Terminal 5 at Heathrow but they did move two rivers, the Duke of Northumberland and Longford, from under the existing airfield and the middle of the T5 construction site. The diversion of the rivers into two new channels will allow the site to be surveyed by archaeologists as the construction teams move forward.
