General News
Below are links to stories of general interest in relation to aviation and airports.
British Airways to cut 400 cabin crew jobs. Also huge job cuts in other airlines
BA is cutting 400 senior cabin crew positions on its long and short-haul routes, as it says it has too many of them. It has a total of around 14,000 cab in staff. The redundancies would be voluntary and that it has started a 90-day consultation process. The first cuts are expected to take effect from next March, and are expected to be from Heathrow. As well as the BA cuts, Iberia is cutting 4,500 jobs. Among other European carriers, Air France-KLM Group plans to cut 1,300 positions at its Dutch unit in addition to 5,000 already being cut at the larger French business. Germany’s Lufthansa is cutting 3,500 administrative posts and as many as 1,000 catering jobs.
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Willie Walsh tells Transport Committee there is no business case for a Gatwick 2nd runway
At the Transport Committee evidence session, Stewart Wingate, Gatwick chief executive, said he would oppose a 3rd runway at Heathrow and wanted to see Gatwick develop as a competing hub airport. But Heathrow's Colin Mattews said airlines will only pay for expansion at one UK airport and that is Heathrow, implying he would oppose a 2nd Gatwick runway. Willie Walsh also told the committee there was no business case to expand Gatwick, and said he was not aware of any discussion with airlines about the extra amount they would have to pay for a new Gatwick runway. Willie Walsh said "the only business case you could stand over is one to invest in a 3rd runway at Heathrow, but I'm not going to waste my time because it's not going to happen." Divide and rule ?
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T&E says global action to tackle aviation now only ‘down to political will’ in ICAO
ICAO has recognised that a global market-based measure to tackle aviation’s contribution to climate change is technically feasible. T&E has said this is an important step, as it now means the only obstacle to global action on aviation emissions is political will. The EU has moved to improve the negotiating climate by proposing a delay of one year in the requirement for flights to and from the EU to comply with its ETS. The next step for ICAO is for a ‘high-level group’ of geographically representative senior government officials to make proposals for a market-based measure, which would then be put to the next ICAO Assembly in September 2013. At this stage, the likely outcome is far from clear. It is now a matter of political will, and T&E has said - throughout the 15 years of ICAO inaction since the Kyoto protocol was signed - that technical objections were simply a convenient excuse. There is no longer any excuse for inaction and the high level group needs to work quickly.
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Gatwick and Heathrow attack each other in row over hub airport status, new runways and flights to Far East
Heathrow and Gatwick have given evidence to the Commons Transport Committee. Colin Matthews for Heathrow said Heathrow should be the single hub, and needs a 3rd runway. Stewart Wingate, Gatwick chief executive, said he would oppose a 3rd runway at Heathrow and wanted to see Gatwick develop as a competing hub airport. Gatwick announced plans to connect low-cost domestic and European flights to long-haul services, to the Far East or USA, with improved baggage transfer, to take on Heathow’s hub airport model. Mr Wingate also proposed London should be served by three 2-runway airports, with both Gatwick and Stansted getting an extra runway, instead of Heathrow getting a 3rd. He rejected suggestions that the South East was facing an airport crisis and said: “There’s a lot of capacity in the system. The challenge is how to make better use of it in the short term.” As well as representatives from the 4 main London airports giving evidence, there were also anti-expansion campaigners. EasyJet said "The importance of the hub airport has been massively overstated.”
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Delta bids for Singapore Airlines’ 49% stake in Virgin Atlantic
Sir Richard Branson could sell his controlling stake in Virgin Atlantic after rival Delta Airlines made a bid for nearly half the business. Delta, the biggest US airline, is understood to have offered to buy Singapore Airlines' 49% stake in Virgin Atlantic which could, in turn, lead to a bid to take a majority stake away from Branson. Branson owns a 51% stake. Delta's move comes as Singapore aims to pull away from the crowded European market and concentrate on the rapidly expanding budget airline industry in south east Asia and Australia. However, if the Delta bid is successful, any offer to Branson would need Delta to team up with its European partners at Air France-KLM because of strict EU rules which say any operator within its boundaries must be controlled by a European-based business. Virgin has its headquarters at Gatwick. It has a fleet of 40 aircraft and flies around 6 million passengers a year to long-haul destinations. It posted a pre-tax loss of £80 million in the 12 months to the end of February.
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African no-frills airline Fastjet starts flights and hopes to get to 12 million African passengers per year
New African no-frills carrier Fastjet has begun its long-awaited first services in Tanzania. The airline, which is being backed by Easyjet founder Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, ran its maiden service on November 29 from Dar es Salaam to Mwanza in Tanzania using its first Airbus A319. There will be 3 aircraft, all A319s. Fastjet said this marks "the start of a new, revolutionary, smart way to travel for African people, and our first steps towards becoming a low-cost, reliable pan-African airline.” They plan to add a 2nd base in Nairobi, before extending its network to Accra and Luanda, Angola. Fastjet's ambition is to carry more than 12 million passengers a year, from the 500,000 at present, by cashing in on demand for regional travel from a burgeoning African middle-class - with some 3 million of them "flying several times a year". Prices to start with may be as low as $20 one-way excluding taxes and charges. They are selling cheap flights as "smart travel". In June, Fastjet bought Lonrho’s aviation business, which currently flies in Africa under the Fly540 branding, with operations in Kenya, Tanzania, Angola and Ghana.
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Ryanair complains about £13 APD but charges its passengers much more in admin etc charges
Air France-KLM Cargo has suspended its twice-weekly B747400 freighter service between Paris and Guangzhou, in southern China, with immediate effect. "Business is not good enough presently to maintain the flights so we’ve suspended them awaiting better days" an Air France Cargo spokesman said. Last month, cargo traffic, measured in Freight Tonne Kilometers, fell by 29.2% on AF-KLM Cargo’s Asian routes and was down 20.4% globally. (IFW)
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Gatwick announces more profit, slightly more passengers and hopes of 2nd runway
Gatwick airport has announced increased profits, and increased numbers of passengers compared to last year. Comparing each month with the same month a year ago, passengers were up by 2.1% in October; up 2.4% in September; up 0.2% in August; down - 0.1% in July; up 4% in June and up 2% in May. Profits increased by 4.8% over the same April to September period in 2011. Stewart Wingate, Gatwick's chief executive, says the airport is opening up new long-haul routes to Russian, China, Vietnam and Korea. He says the growing numbers of passengers "is why we recently announced our plans to explore 2nd runway options as we believe growth at Gatwick is the best option for increasing connectivity for the next generation." He says there is an over-emphasis in the UK on the need for a single hub airport and London could follow a similar model to New York, which is served by 3 key airports. Rival Heathrow says the New York model wouldn’t work in the UK as there is only one major network airline in this country - British Airways - compared to three in the US.
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Boris now wants not only a Thames estuary airport but a massive aerotropolis = airport city
Boris Johnson - during his trip to India to promote London - set out his vision to build an “aerotropolis” around a new terminal for his fantasy project of a Thames Estuary airport. He said a town of about 20,000 people could spring up to the east of London based around a 4-runway hub airport (it was 5 runways last week...). It would have four or five “anchor” developments such as a hospital, university campus, a major business or exhibition centre to create thousands of jobs. A social infrastructure including homes, schools, shops, parks and a transport network would be a key part of the plan. Any such scheme would have truly dreadful environmental and biodiversity impacts. The Mayor said London had “much to learn” from India on the future of airports. He added that he was “inspired” by his visit to Hyderabad’s two runway airport — a leading example of an “aerotropolis” that is set to double in size over the next five years (that is because India is only starting to develop its aviation, while we did so decades ago, and it has a massively larger population).
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‘Peak oil’ is dead – but the need for urgency is greater than ever
Jos Dings, the Direct of Transport & Environment (T&E) writes that we need to ditch any notion that ‘peak oil’ will come to our rescue on climate change, and that somehow geological constraints will end our addiction to fossil fuels. At the very least it’s time to be much more precise and replace the term ‘peak oil’ with ‘peak conventional oil’ (somehow I don’t feel this slogan will catch on!). The ‘peak oilers’ overlooked for too long the fact that high oil prices spur investment into ever weirder, riskier and higher-carbon ways to produce oil – tar sands, tight oil, oil shale, deep sea, maybe even oil shale or ‘coal-to-liquid’. We need to leave two thirds of known fossil fuel reserves in the ground to avoid catastrophic climate change. That is the key challenge, and an enormous one, for global climate policy to solve, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it points to carbon taxes as a key element, if not the solution. Well worth reading the whole article.