In an interview with the Chinese media following the arrival of the A330 in China, Xu Xin, chief executive officer, Beijing Capital Airlines said that over the next five years the carrier intends to purchase at least 30 widebody aircraft to open more international routes between Chinese cities and major overseas tourist destinations.
Australian airline, Qantas Airways has said it will resume flights between Sydney and San Francisco after Australian authorities gave approval for an expanded codeshare arrangement with American Airlines.
US major, American Airlines is to grow its network into Mexico, the Caribbean and Latin America later this year, further strengthening its position in these key regions. Alongside the new routes, American will also reinstate its link between New York's John F. Kennedy Airport and Simon Bolívar International Airport in Caracas, Venezuela, a service that was ended as the Venezuelan government withheld funds from airline ticket sales.
UK regional airline, Eastern Airways will increase services between Yorkshire-based airport, Leeds Bradford and Southampton with an additional mid-afternoon departure.
This year has already seen JetBlue introduce flights from Fort Lauderdale to Albany, Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Mexico City, Nashville and Philadelphia. These have quickly followed the launch of services to Jacksonsville, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh late last year.
The move enables the carrier to maintain its network operations but without any Danish Collective Agreement, which would have restricted its operations from the Danish capital by making it difficult for the aircraft to refuel and arrangements to be made to handle aircraft, despite the airline’s pay and conditions for its pilots and cabin crew better than the standards set under the agreement.
Airline ancillary revenue has continued to grow for the eighth consecutive year, according to IdeaWorksCompany, who tracked 63 airlines and researched financial filings made by 130 airlines all over the world.
The network growth follows an increase in demand between the US and St Lucia, located in the eastern Caribbean Sea and part of the Lesser Antilles. According to arrivals data, visitors are travelling to St Lucia at a record pace with international arrivals from the US currently up nine per cent versus last year.
After the merger of Vilnius, Kaunas and Palanga Airports last year, the Lithuanian air gateways have witnessed a significant increase in passenger and flight volumes, sales and overall net profit over a year-long period.
British Airways has announced it will introduce its first Boeing 787-9 into its fleet in September 2015 and will initially deploy the larger Dreamliner variant on its route between London Heathrow and Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi, India from the start of the winter 2015/2016 schedule in late October.
Low-cost Russian airline, Pobeda has banned passengers from chewing gum on board because it is spending too much scraping it off its airplanes interiors.
Although the carrier has almost ten years experience in the cargo business, this will be its first growth into scheduled passenger operations. It intends to launch operations from September 2015 using a small fleet of three Boeing 737-500s that have already been acquired and are currently undergoing pre-service maintenance in Jordan.
Initially established in September 1994 under the AirZena brand, the carrier provided charter flights to the United Arab Emirates, Italy, China, Egypt, India, Syria and regular scheduled flights to Austria. It was granted national carrier status in November 1999 and latterly the Georgian Airways title has been added.
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) has said that more jobs could be generated and additional economic growth could be achieved in Namibia if intra-African markets are opened up to allow for greater airline transport connectivity.
The three-times-weekly link will be operated with Air Canada’s ultra modern Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, and the new service will cut travel time between the two cities by five hours.
The state-run airline has proposed to fly three weekly flights each to San Francisco and Toronto from New Delhi with a Boeing 777-200LR aircraft, which is likely to be reconfigured to include more seating capacity, the airline has said.
Madeira Airport in Portugal hopes to exceed the 2.5 million passenger per annum milestone this year after reaching a record high of 2.46 million passengers in 2014. The growth in demand has been supported by an increase in connectivity to the Portuguese archipelago.
The airline will operate three routes from Eilat Ovda Airport in the far south of the country, near the border with Jordan. Initially, flights will operate to and from Budapest in Hungary, Kaunas in Lithuania and Krakow in Poland.
The airline plans to introduce new services to London Luton, Berlin Schönefeld, Manchester, Amsterdam and Bristol – the latter of which will be a brand new destination for Vienna Airport.
The twice-weekly service will operate on Wednesdays and Sundays from May next year to the German city which is located in the centre of the Rhine-Ruhr region – Germany’s largest metropolitan area.
The airline industry is opening its eyes to Moldova as an international market and meetings at this year’s Routes Silk Road forum in Tbilisi, Georgia have helped establish at least one new air service and confirmed an increased capacity offering on an existing route.
UK ACMI and airline sub-charter specialist, Titan Airways, is seeking to raise its profile among the world’s airlines and is using the Routes regional event calendar to interact with airlines in specific regions.
