Etihad Airways has received the coveted award for Best First Class at the annual Ultratravel Middle East Awards (ULTRAs) ceremony, which was held last night at the iconic Burj Al Arab Jumeirah hotel in Dubai. The award is another major accolade for the UAE national airline's First Class experience, which has repeatedly been voted best in the world. The ULTRAs are voted for by the re...
Airbus, Ctrip.com, China's largest online travel agency and VariFlight, China's leading flight status service provider jointly launched the "A380 World Travel Route Design Contest" at the Civil Aviation Communications Summit 2015 held Thursday in Beijing. The contest, themed "A Reason to Travel Around the World", intends to provide a round-the-world travel chance for...
More than 200 landing approaches made by commercial airliners over the past 15 years prompted cockpit emergency collision warnings -- the last possible alert before a crash -- yet most of the incidents weren't reported by pilots, according to global data collected by Honeywell International Inc. The hazardous approaches made up a minute portion of the more than 20 million analyzed flig...
Just when we thought it was safe to travel again and proceed with normal flight bookings, volcanic ash spewed from Lombok's Mt. Barujari (Rinjani) has got some flights cancelled again after being quiet for the past couple weeks. Both Virgin Australia and Jetstar have announced cancellations on their websites. Virgin cancelled all flights in and out of Bali and a 9:00 a.m. flight this mor...
UTair (UT, Khanty-Mansiysk) has signed two agreements with eleven creditor banks to restructure RUB43 billion (USD657.9 million) worth of debt. The first agreement involves a syndicated loan for RUB18.9 billion (USD287.2 million) for a period of seven years while the second is for RUB24.1 billion (USD366.2 million) over 12 years. However, sources who spoke to Russia's Vedomosti newspaper sa...
Members of Etihad Airways' cabin crew will represent the airline at Sunday's Formula 1 Etihad Airways Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, when they walk out in front of a worldwide audience of motor-racing enthusiasts at the Yas Marina Circuit. Etihad Airways handpicked 56 cabin crew-members as ‘grid girls’ who will wear the airline’s elegant uniforms at the starting grid on race da...
The Indian air force has received its eighth and final batch of Antonov AN−32RE tactical transports to be upgraded in the Ukraine. The delivery of the five aircraft completes the total life extension, overhaul and modernisation of 40 aircraft to AN−32RE standard by Plant 410 of Civil Aviation and Antonov in Kyiv, Ukraine. The “RE” in the aircraft’s new de...
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has issued a draft ruling giving American Airlines and Qantas’s proposed expanded alliance on trans-Pacific routes the green light for the next five years. Although Qantas and American had an existing alliance that the ACCC approved in September 2011 for five years, the pair sought reauthorisation of a new agreement that included a...
Virgin Australia has returned to the top of the punctuality table, edging out Qantas as the nation’s most on-time domestic airline, government statistics show. According to figures from the Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics (BITRE), Virgin had the highest percentage of on-time arrivals in October, with 89.8 per cent of its domestic flights reaching their destinati...
China is making the aircraft-leasing business a popular destination for mergers and acquisitions. Plane-leasing companies in China have been involved in more than US$16 billion worth of acquisitions since last year, according to figures compiled by Bloomberg. In addition, billionaire tycoons such as Li Ka-shing, Hong Kong's richest man, have entered the industry during that period. Behin...
China will mandate that its air traffic controllers use only English when communicating with pilots of any airline starting in 2017, according to the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC). According to Zhao Yun, an official at the CAAC in Beijing, "the move will improve situational awareness for foreign pilots. By ATC communicating in English pilots will be aware of the positi...
As many as 1.02 million air passengers traveled in and out of Tibet Autonomous Region on the flights of Tibet Airlines(TV) in January-October 2015, the Lhasa-based carrier said on Thursday. Tibet Airlines has hit the 1 million passenger mark in the first ten months of the year. The airline said it holds a 32.7% market share in the Tibetan air travel market and has carried more passengers than a...
