Richard Branson is finding a new use for an old Virgin Atlantic jumbo jetliner: to fling rockets to orbit. Virgin Galactic, the commercial space company founded by the billionaire, plans to send small rockets inflight from the Boeing 747-400 nicknamed "Cosmic Girl" that it purchased from Branson's airline. Branson is among the entrepreneurs vying to shake up the US$6 billion co...
Overcast conditions have greeted the arrival of Philippines Airlines’s inaugural flight to Cairns. Flight PR218 from Manila, operated by Airbus A320 RP-C8613, landed a little after 0700 local time on Thursday. The aircraft was on the ground in Cairns for about two hours before heading across the Tasman to Auckland, which is Philippine Airlines’ first destination in New Zeala...
Australian authorities said Thursday that new analysis confirms they've likely been searching in the right place for a missing Malaysian airliner. Searchers have been combing a 120,000-square-kilometer (46,000-square-mile) part of the Indian Ocean since last year but have yet to turn up any trace of Flight 370. A wing flap was found in July washed up on remote Reunion Island. The new ana...
Essendon Airport is hopeful of having the appropriate security screening facilities in place for Jetgo to begin flights from Dubbo in the first quarter of 2016. Jetgo had planned to fly from Dubbo to Melbourne Tullamarine starting in late October but was unable to secure terminal space at the airport. Moves to operate into nearby Essendon Airport then hit a roadblock because of a lack of passen...
Airports are responding to changing passenger expectations with greater investment in IT systems such as back-end improvements to speed up checkin and border processing, beacon technology to provide real-time notifications and greater accessibility to wifi. A survey of airport executives from technology provider SITA and Airports Council International (ACI) found airports around the world spent...
Boeing has marked the completion of C-17 Globemaster final assembly at its Long Beach, California plant. The last of 279 C-17s to be built at Long Beach flew over the assembly facility there on Sunday (US time) before heading to the company’s San Antonio site for short-term storage ahead of delivery to Qatar early next year. “This is truly the end of an era. It&rs...
Regional Express (Rex) deputy chairman John Sharp says the airline is in a strong position to withstand the current weakness in the national economy. However, other regional operators may not be so fortunate. “The Australian economy, reflecting the worldwide one, continues to be weak and this will prolong the crisis affecting regional aviation,” Sharp told shareholders at Rex&rsq...
Xiamen Airlines has become the latest Chinese airline to land in Australia with the Skyteam member’s inaugural flight Down Under touching down in Sydney on Monday morning. Boeing 787-8 B-2763, operating MF807 from Fuzhou, arrived at Mascot at 0955 local time and received an ARFF monitor cross during its taxi to the gate. The aircraft was on the ground for about two and a half hours b...
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...
Virgin Australia is making a smart utilisation play with a new back-of-the-clock winter weekend flight between Christchurch on New Zealand’s South Island and Rarotonga in the Cook Islands beginning in seven months’ time. Tickets are now on sale with an introductory lead-in fare of NZ$299. The airline will fly the roundtrip service once weekly between June 25 and October 8 2016 using...
Spirit AeroSystems began production of the fuselage for the first P-8A Poseidon maritime surveillance aircraft for the RAAF last month. The Kansas-based aerostructures company announced on November 20 that it began production work on the 737 military derivative in October, with the first unit scheduled to be delivered to Boeing early next year. “Spirit has a unique...
