Emirates, Qatar Airways, Air France and Lufthansa among carriers pausing services to and from Beirut
International airlines have suspended more flights to Lebanon amid an Israeli bombardment that authorities said had killed almost 560 people since Monday.
The United Arab Emirates-based airline Emirates announced the temporary suspension of its flights to Beirut on Tuesday and Wednesday. Its sister airline flydubai also cancelled flights to Beirut on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Continue reading...Aircraft operated by KLM was preparing to depart when incident occurred at busy Amsterdam hub
A person has died after falling into the spinning turbine blades of a departing passenger jet at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport.
The death occurred on the apron outside the busy hub’s terminal as a KLM flight was preparing to depart for Billund in Denmark.
Continue reading...Operator also found by Amsterdam court to have painted ‘overly rosy picture’ of sustainable aviation fuel
The Dutch airline KLM has misled customers with vague environmental claims and painted “an overly rosy picture” of its sustainable aviation fuel, a court has found.
In a greenwashing case brought by the campaign group Fossielvrij, the district court of Amsterdam ruled on Wednesday that KLM had broken the law with misleading advertising in 15 of the 19 environmental statements it assessed. They include claims that the airline is moving towards a “more sustainable” future and statements on its website about the benefits of offsetting a flight.
Continue reading...Paris court clears aviation giants over disaster that killed 228 people flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris
A Paris court has cleared Air France and Airbus of involuntary manslaughter over the crash of flight 447 in 2009 that killed 228 people.
Giving its verdict on Monday, the court said if there had been faults committed, “no certain causal link” with the accident could be shown.
Continue reading...Anger as airline and Airbus plead not guilty to charge 13 years after flight AF447 crashed, killing 228 people
A manslaughter trial over the 2009 crash of Air France flight 447 has opened in Paris, with the courtroom falling silent as a judge read out the names of 228 passengers and crew who died in the airline’s worst ever accident.
The grief of the victims’ families quickly erupted into anger as the chief executives of Air France and Airbus pleaded not guilty to involuntary manslaughter and offered their condolences.
Continue reading...Judgment overturns lower court’s decision to dismiss case of flight AF 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in which 228 died
An appeal court has ruled that Air France and Airbus should be sent to trial for “unintentional manslaughter” over the crash of a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in 2009 in which 228 people died.
The judgment, which overturned the decision of a court to dismiss the case, was welcomed by victims’ families, who expressed their “immense satisfaction” at finally having their voices heard.
Continue reading...MPs vote to suspend internal flights if the trip can be completed by train within two and a half hours instead
French MPs have voted to suspend domestic airline flights that can be made by direct train in less than two and a half hours, as part of a series of climate and environmental measures.
After a heated debate in the Assemblée Nationale at the weekend, the ban, a watered-down version of a key recommendation from President Emmanuel Macron’s citizens’ climate convention, was adopted.
Continue reading...Coronavirus has hit few sectors harder than air travel, wiping out tens of thousands of jobs and uncountable billions in revenue. While most fleets were grounded, the industry was forced to reimagine its future
When an airline no longer wants a plane, it is sent away to a boneyard, a storage facility where it sits outdoors on a paved lot, wingtip to wingtip with other unwanted planes. From the air, the planes look like the bleached remains of some long-forgotten skeleton. Europe’s biggest boneyard is built on the site of a late-30s airfield in Teruel, in eastern Spain, where the dry climate is kind to metallic airframes. Many planes are here for short-term storage, biding their time while they change owners or undergo maintenance. If their future is less clear, they enter long-term storage. Sometimes a plane’s limbo ends when it is taken apart, its body rendered efficiently down into spare parts and recycled metal.
In February, Patrick Lecer, the CEO of Tarmac Aerosave, the company that owns the Teruel boneyard and three others in France, had one eye cocked towards China. Lecer has been in aviation long enough to remember flights being grounded during the Sars epidemic in 2003. This year, when the coronavirus spread beyond Asia, he knew what was coming. “We started making space in our sites, playing Tetris with the aircraft to free up two or three or four more spaces in each,” he told me.
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