London’s Heathrow Airport is getting ready to trial technologies and processes that reduce risk of coronavirus transmission. The first of these trials will be a temperature screening technology which uses camera detection systems capable of monitoring the temperatures of people moving through the airport. These passenger-facing trials will first be conducted in the airport’s immigration…
Southwest Airlines will sell and lease back 20 planes for gross proceeds of about $815 million, the company said in a regulatory filing on Friday. Southwest’s deal involves 10 Boeing 737-800 aircraft and 10 737 MAX 8 aircraft. The airline did not specify who it was selling the planes to and the duration of the…
Lufthansa Group airlines to take off again with 160 aircraft from June with 106 destinations. Starting in June, Lufthansa, Eurowings and SWISS will be offering monthly restart schedules to significantly more destinations in Germany and Europe than in the past few weeks. A total of 80 aircraft will be reactivated with the “June timetable”. This…
An investigation by BBC News Arabic has analysed flight tracking data and open source footage which shows how Iran’s largest airline – Mahan Air – continued to fly while government flight bans were in place, and contributed to the spread of Covid-19 in the Middle East. Mahan Air ran hundreds of flights to and from…
The chief executive of Heathrow today said it could be 10 to 15 years before the UK need a third runway at the airport due to the coronavirus crisis. Speaking to the transport select committee, John Holland-Kaye insisted that a third runway at the airport remained “a critical economic plank for the growth of the…
More airlines could have collapsed or consolidated globally without government intervention amid the Covid-19 pandemic and the aviation industry will see a decline in passenger traffic as well as the number of aircraft used by carriers once the crisis subsides, Emirates president Tim Clark said. “We know the A380 is over” Emirates president Sir Tim…
A patch of dry desert dirt near Alice Springs has become an eerie backdrop for lines of “mothballed” aircraft. Singapore Airlines has sent seven planes — four superjumbo Airbus A380s and three Boeing 777s –to the Northern Territory’s Asia Pacific Aircraft Storage facility, to join passenger jets from budget subsidiary Scoot. Outback Photographics photographer Steve…
First agreement for technical and engineering support on an Airbus A380. Lufthansa Technik’s new technical and engineering services for temporary operational changes from passenger to cargo aircraft have met with great interest in the aviation market. So far, the cabin modification experts of the company have received enquiries from more than 40 airlines. More than…
Two weeks of coronavirus shutdown were enough to hit Air France-KLM with an 815 million-euro first-quarter operating loss, the airline group said on Thursday – predicting demand could take “several years” to recover. The Franco-Dutch airline recorded a €815m operating loss in a first quarter that was only hit by two weeks of the lockdowns…
A Nigerian woman aboard an Emirates Airline flight, evacuating Nigerians from Dubai, gave birth to a baby boy. The woman was among the Nigerian travellers stranded in the country who were travelling back to Nigeria. The woman gave birth thirty minutes after take-off which led to the return of the aircraft to Dubai. “She is…
Staff at Italy’s busiest airport are using augmented reality helmets to scan passenger temperatures. Fiumicino Airport in Rome is now the first in Europe to use ‘smart helmets’ to check the temperature of travellers. The helmets are equipped with portable thermoscanners that can screen people for symptoms of the new coronavirus at a very safe…
By the end of May, the airline plans to grow its network back to over 50 destinations with a further number of destinations planned to be added by the end of June. Qatar Airways will begin a phased approach to expanding its network in line with passenger demand evolution and the expected relaxation of entry…