GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The JetBlue pilot who made world headlines after he was arrested for causing a mid-air panic among passengers is being held without bond following a federal court hearing in Texas Monday 2 April.
Clayton Osbon, who has been a flight captain with the US airline for 12 years, was charged last week after making distressing remarks and acting erratically on a New York to Las Vegas flight. The pilot allegedly ran in the aisle shouting “say your prayers” and violently knocked on the cockpit door when he was locked out by a worried first officer, before being subdued by several passengers.
An off-duty pilot took the controls of the plane, allowing it to make an emergency landing in Amarillo, Texas.
Shares in JetBlue remained down on Monday evening, closing at $4.85, down from $5.22 on March 28, the day before the incident. Another pilot incident occurred on a JetBlue flight in 2010 when a pilot, following a dispute with a passenger, exited from the plane via its inflatable chute after landing in New York.
Links to other sources: CNN, The Daliy Mail, Reuters
BASEL, SWITZERLAND – Airline Swiss will begin using City Airport in London rather than Heathrow for its Basel flights starting 21 May.
The airline says “the modifications to Swiss’s Basel services have been prompted by the planned sale of sister Lufthansa Group carrier bmi to the International Airlines Group.”
Zurich airport
ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – More morning and evening flights, but fewer flights over southern Germany from Zurich: this is the tradeoff agreed to by Switzerland and Germany, which announced Saturday 28 January they have signed an agreement to reduce noise.
The new accord is expected to go into effect in the summer of 2012.
Noise reduction in the southern German air corridor has been a contentious issue for a number of years and the two governments said in announcing the agreement that they also hope new developments in airplane technology will ease the situation.
Swiss, one of the main airlines using the corridor, has said it will be replacing half of its fleet there by 2020, according to TSR.
Switzerland has said it needs more flexibility for flights in and out of Zurich, particularly in the morning.
Zurich Airport had 20,911 “movements” of planes in December 2012, up 1.7 percent from a year earli.
easyJet in Geneva
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The number of passengers travelling on easyJet grew by 11.6 percent in the past six months, but the airline’s growing popularity was not enough to stem losses due to fuel price increases. The company 10 May published half-year results.
Load factor was a healthy 84.6 and 59 percent of the 23.9 million passengers now originate outside the UK. The airline is Geneva’s largest, with 36 percent of the airport’s traffic.
The pre-tax loss was £153 million, compared to £78m in the previous six months, due to steeper fuel prices and passenger taxes: “Fuel unit cost increase accounts for £43 million and increased passenger taxation accounts for £21 million of the £74 million increase in pre-tax loss compared with the prior year,” the company’s statement notes.
easyJet says it has now sold nearly half of its summer seats.
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Swiss was the best-performing of Lufthansa Group’s carriers in 2010, Air Transport World reports 21 March. The airline group 17 March published its annual report for 2010, showing Swiss in a much stronger position than in 2009.
It carried 14 million passengers, the highest number in its history and had a load capacity of 82.4, above the industry average: Europe averaged 79. in 2010 and North America 82.2, according to Iata (industry association) figures.
Financially, Swiss had profits of of €298 million, up from €93m in 2009. Revenues rose 25 percent to €3.46 billion. The figures exclude Edelweiss.
The company has increased traffic by about 50 percent a year for the past five years, since its partnership with Lufthansa, and it has hired 1,000 new staff.
The strong 2010 performance “is due largely to effective cost management, but also to strong demand and the upswing in intercontinental and freight business, as well as strong sales in the domestic Swiss market”, the company said in a message to shareholders.
The Swiss economy outperformed Europe in 2010.
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch.com) – Swiss is flying high again, with CHF61 million in profits for the first six months of 2010, after a dismal start to the year thanks to the Icelandic volcano that forced planes to stay on the ground. Profits were down compared to the first six months of 2009 (CHF65m), but the company’s total income, CHF2.25 billion, was up 6 percent compared to a year earlier.
The outlook for 2010 remains bright, according to Swiss chief exective CEO Harry Hohmeister. “The developments of the past few months enable us to look ahead with greater confidence than we could have mustered just a few months ago. Business has picked up, and the trend is particularly encouraging on our intercontinental routes. We’ll be investing well over half a billion francs in renewing our fleet and further developing our product this year, and will also be recruiting 500 new staff.”
Hohmeister credited Switzerland’s economic recovery, stronger than its neighbours’ in Europe, with contributing to the good results. The company noted, however, that Swiss “is suffering the effects of both a weakened euro and (above all) a substantial increase in fuel costs.”
Easyjet flight coming into Geneva, Saleve in the background
London, England (GenevaLunch) – EasyJet, one of the airlines hardest hit by ash cloud bans, has come up with a detector that could allow pilots to spot too much ash and change course. Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority says it is “happy an airline appeared to have found a technical solution, and, although it was not endorsing the product, it would do what it could to help certification,” reports the BBC.
The new system, called Avoid, for Airborne Volcanic Object Identifier and Detector, is described in a press release issued Friday 4 June by easyJet:
The system, essentially a weather radar for ash, was created by Dr Fred Prata of the Norwegian Institute for Air Research (NILU). AVOID is a system that involves placing infrared technology onto an aircraft to supply images to both the pilots and an airline’s flight control centre.
These images will enable pilots to see an ash cloud up to 100 km ahead of the aircraft and at altitudes between 5,000ft and 50,000ft. This will allow pilots to make adjustments to the plane’s flight path to avoid any ash cloud. The concept is very similar to weather radars which are standard on commercial airliners today.
EasyJet is Geneva’s top airline in terms of passenger traffic.
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Geneva residents heading for San Francisco and who want to opt for the new Swiss airline Airbus A340 flower power plane will be happy to see they’ll pay less than their fellow passengers who board in Zurich.
The company has sent its special offer fares to regular customers and for those flying from Geneva starting 23 August (booking by 30 June) prices start at CHF1,099, but Zurich passengers’ prices start at CHF1,229.
Swiss non-stop, Zurich-San Francisco: flower power plane
The explanation, says spokesperson Jean-Claude Donzel, is that the Geneva flight is priced competitively according to the market for indirect flights from the city, with Air France, BA and Lufthansa all flying to San Francisco. Zurich alone offers a direct flight, and in the airline market, direct flights tend to be more expensive.
Facebook and Twitter played a part in drumming up enthusiasm for the first of the new flights between Zurich and San Francisco on Swiss. The plane, painted to reflect an earlier San Francisco era of flower children, was kept a surprise until it was rolled out onto the tarmac just before its maiden flight Tuesday 1 June.
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Customers of Swiss who are flying to Shanghai or Hong Kong this summer will notice that the flight takes longer, and the usual view of vast stretches of Russia is no longer there: the airline has been told it cannot fly over Russian air space. No explanation is being provided by the airline, which Sunday confirmed to TSR television a report published by NZZ am Sonntag, that the fly-around to the south has been taking place since March. TSR hints that it may be the result of Russia demanding a higher tax to fly over its territory.
Swiss has been showing teaser photos of the new plane, on Facebook
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The new Swiss Flower Power plane, a startling change from the normally more discreet Swiss fleet planes, was scheduled to roll onto the tarmac in Zurich late Wednesday afternoon.
The company will offer six flights a week to the California city starting 2 June. It has been teasing fans with snapshots of part of the colourful plane on its Facebook page.
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Swiss Tuesday shared with its customers on Facebook its disappointment in sharply lower traffic in April, due to volcano-related cancelled flights: 16.1 percent fewer passengers than in April 2009, for a total of 972,608.
Swiss plane in the air
Update 13:40 Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Planes are flying over Switzerland again, but the airline Swiss, like many others, is unable to get all its scheduled flights back on track immediately. The main problem is that several airports remain at least partially closed, a spokesperson told GenevaLunch: in Germany, and until late morning, France, while Sweden was gradually opening Wednesday morning. Long-haul flights to both Paris and London are now being allowed to land.
Eighty of the 400 flights normally scheduled by Swiss for 21 April remained canceled, the spokesperson said at 13:40. Long-haul traffic is for the most part back to normal.
Swiss, aloft
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Airline Swiss will offer more connections between Britain and Geneva starting 10 January 2010, with six new flights daily to Heathrow. The company is reducing the number of flights between Geneva and London City from the current six a day to four. The additional flights will be provided in part by an additional Heathrow-based airplane, but Swiss will be working closely with British Midlands and some of the new connections will be codeshare flights.
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Passengers flying economy class on Swiss will do their own check-ins starting 30 July, ATS news service reports the airline confirming.
Electronic check-ins will thus replace check-in desks. The service will be evaluated in the autumn.
Thirteen bodies have washed up on the Tanzanian island of Mafia (map), along with debris, and they are thought to be those of victims of the Comoros archipelago crash of a Yemeni airliner in 1 July. Officials say DNA tests will be needed to identify them. The island is south of Dar es Salaam, not far from the mainland. BBC
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Baboo, which serves 16 destinations from Geneva has put 60 percent of its staff on partial unemployment, reports Le Temps, despite continuing strong growth. Growth in fact is the source of the problem, the newspaper quotes company director Jacques Bankir as saying. Baboo’s sales increased 87 percent in 2008 to CHR56 million. The number of passengers rose 75 percent.
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – A woman from canton Basel State was diagnosed at the Basel cantonal hospital with A/H1N1 swine flu in Switzerland, the third case in Switzerland. The national influenza centre in Geneva has not yet confirmed the diagnosis. She flew into Zurich from Washington DC, USA 22 May, announced the Federal Office of Public Health. Swiss health authorities obtained the list of passengers from the airline the woman was traveling on, and they will be informed by health authorities in their own countries.
Australian Airline Qantas will cut up to 1,750 jobs and ground 10 aircraft in an attempt to stay afloat in their worst aviation downturn in years. They will also defer delivery of super-jumbo A380s and other aircraft and have decreased their profit forecast by 80 percent. The airline said Australian domestic routes would be the most heavily affected by the capacity cuts, along with routes to the US, UK and South Africa. Sydney Morning Herald
Update 19 March 08:25 Paris, France (GenevaLunch) – More than one million people are expected to take part in a major French strike today, reports the BBC. Many of France’s public servants but also private sector companies began striking late Wednesday, 18 March, and they are expected to stay away from work until Friday 08:00 20 March.
Rome, Italy (International Herald Tribune) – Italian national carrier Alitalia, grounded after it ran out of money, will be flying again 13 January after a group of Italian investors headed by the chairman of scooter company Piaggio saved it.
Title: The Demise of Swissair
Location: Lausanne, Palace Hotel
Link out: Click here
Description: Executives Int. presentatin: Karl Wüthrich, provisional administrator Swissair Group, on the demise of the national icon as experienced by its liquidator
Start Time: 19:00
Date: 12 Nov 2008
Alitalia is headed towards becoming the first national airline to go under since Swissair and Sabena in 2001 but Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is under pressure to save it, with 19,000 jobs in the company and thousands more in airports at risk. Bloomberg
