Crystal Luxury Air has acquired an ex-Air Austral B777-200(LR) in the form of F-OLRA (msn 40955) now re-registered as P4-XTL under the Aruban registry. The aircraft will shortly be joined by a B787-8 as well as an A319-100CJ and a Bombardier Global Express XRS. Beginning March 2016, the cruise specialist will use the new aircraft to operate private charters and transport guests from any po...
Southwest Airlines and the United States have settled a lawsuit involving allegations the Texan LCC operated numerous B737 aircraft that did not conform to US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) maintenance standards and were therefore not airworthy. In November last year, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced a USD12 million lawsuit against Southwest for three separate types of mainte...
The flying testbed derived from the Mil Mil-24K (NATO reporting name: Hind) for testing components of the future high-speed helicopter flew for the first time on December 23, 2015, a defense industry source told journalists on Thursday, Dec. 24. According to the source, the airborne laboratory got off the ground for the first time at the Mil Helicopter Plant’s (a Russian Helicopter s...
India and Russia took forward a project to jointly manufacture military choppers under the 'Make in India' initiative even as other plans, including one to construct frigates, took a backseat during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Moscow. Among the 16 agreements inked during the visit, the only one on defence cooperation - a significant facet of the bilateral relation - refe...
Travel firms Thomson and Thomas Cook have extended a suspension of flights to the Egyptian holiday resort of Sharm el-Sheikh until at least 23 March. The UK government suspended flights to the Red Sea resort in November after the suspected bombing of a Russian passenger jet killed 224 people. So-called Islamic State militants claimed responsibility for the attack. Over 16,000 Britons stra...
Mitsubishi Aircraft is to delay the first delivery of the MRJ regional airliner by around a year, to mid-2018. Initial delivery of the aircraft had been scheduled for the second quarter of 2017. But the airframer recently disclosed that it was reviewing the entire development plan following the commencement of flight-testing. Mitsubishi has revealed that it will amend the schedule, shifting...
Michael Jackson’s Earth Song was the festive number one, kids were going crazy to have the must-have ‘Pogs’ as presents, there was a run on Cranberries thanks to Delia Smith’s latest Christmas recipes – and ba.com was about to make its debut on the internet. The worldwide web was still finding its feet and few people really understood how big a difference the inter...
Today the Long-range aviation of the Russian Aerospace Forces celebrates its 101st anniversary. At the present time the Long-range aviation is equipped with strategic missile-carrying aircraft Tu-160 and Tu-95MS, long-range bombers Tu-22M3, air tankers Il-78(M), special purpose aircraft A-30B, air transports An-12, An-26, as well as Mi-8 and Mi-26 helicopters. This year, crews of the Long-ra...
Darwin-based Airnorth will expand out of Northern Australia for the first time when it commences daily services from Toowoomba’s Wellcamp Airport to Melbourne from next March. The flights will be operated by Airnorth’s 76-seat Embraer E170 jets from March 14, with new three-times-weekly Wellcamp-Cairns services to begin at the same time. “This initi...
Hainan Airlines has returned to Sydney for the first time since 2012 with the inaugural direct seasonal service from Xi’an touching down at Sydney Airport on Thursday morning. Hainan launched flights to Sydney in January 2011, when it served Sydney on a Hangzhou-Shenzhen-Sydney routing. However, it pulled off the route a year later. Its new twice-weekly flights fr...
Eying an increasing business jet market in the Middle East and Africa, business aviation services companies Private Jet Charter (PJC) and Jet Connections are teaming to establish a firm specializing in private aircraft management, sales and acquisition in the regions. The new company, X Jets, has opened its headquarters in Dubai with a “soft launch,” and will begin full operations earl...
Jet Aviation Basel recently installed two Rockwell Collins Pro Line 21 Avionic upgrades: one on a Dassault Falcon 2000; the other on a Dassault Falcon 2000EX. The company has also developed a Pro Line 21 support kit to reduce expected downtime of such installations to six weeks. “With our Pro Line 21 support kit, we demonstrate our engineering and manufacturing capabilities and our abi...
In February 2016, 19 Gama Aviation employees will climb Mount Kilimanjaro to raise money for Kiomboi hospital in Tanzania. Alongside other medical operations, the hospital handles approximately 8,000 births a year. They only have enough water for one hour a day. Because of the lack of water, heavily pregnant women have to collect water from the unclean river to bring to the hospital t...
Piaggio Aerospace has delivered two Avanti Evos to European customers, bringing the total shipments of the twin-engined turboprop in 2015 to three aircraft. WinAir of Germany and an undisclosed customer each took delivery of the seven-seat aircraft in December. The launch customer, Superior Air of Greece, received the first Evo in April – nearly a year after the programme’s launch....
After a slow start, the Sikorsky CH-53K development project is gathering pace at West Palm Beach, Florida, with sixth test flights and counting since initial lift-off in late October and a second aircraft almost complete. The US Marine Corps announced this week that one of its own pilots flew the King Stallion, taking over from Sikorsky’s test team for the first time. Lt Col Jonathan M...
Honda Aircraft has announced starting deliveries of the HondaJet to customers two weeks after obtaining airworthiness certification. The initial deliveries to an undisclosed set of customers allow the North Carolina-based manufacturer to meet its goal of handing over aircraft by end-year. “I hope we soon will begin to see many HondaJets at airports around the world,” says Honda A...
Preliminary figures released today by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) show the total number of passengers carried on scheduled services rising to 3.5 billion in 2015, a 6.4 per cent increase over last year. The number of departures reached approximately 34 million globally, and world passenger traffic, expressed in terms of total scheduled revenue passenger-kilometres (RPKs...
Split and Zadar are two more Croatian cities to which passengers will be able to fly as early as on 30 April by LOT. The Polish carrier will offer them the fastest and most comfortable journey to the most popular holiday resorts in Croatia, both direct from Warsaw, and with one convenient transfer from other cities in Poland and Europe. This is the first offer of this type on the market! T...
Kroll Bond Rating Agency (KBRA) releases its first sector outlook on airlines. The overview of the airline sector is KBRA’s view on key themes for the airline industry in 2016. While much of the focus is on the U.S. aviation market as the largest in the world, this comment provides a general view of non-U.S. airlines as well. KBRA rates a number of airlines (to date, on an unpublishe...
Monarch Aircraft Engineering Limited (MAEL), the engineering division of The Monarch Group, announces a line maintenance technical handling agreement with Austrian Airlines. The agreement, which commenced on 15th December 2015 is to provide call out support to the Austrian operator’s Airbus A320 and Embraer E195 flying program into Manchester Airport. Commenting on this agreement, Neil...
Embraer will roll out the first jet of the second generation of the E-Jets family of commercial aircraft, the E-Jets E2, on February 25, 2016. The ceremony will take place at Embraer headquarters, in São José dos Campos, and the model to be presented is the E190-E2, which has its first flight scheduled for the second half of 2016 and entry into service in 2018. The other two aircraft...
