Aviation

Just what is going on with the shortage of pilots in Canada? Federal officials assessing training programs have concluded major changes are needed to address the ever increasing problem. In fact, this is not just a Canadian issue. The US aviation industry is also dealing with a shortage of pilots and other workers, outdated technology, and strain on the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which manages the nation’s airspace.

A US federal judge has ordered Boeing Co. to be arraigned on a felony charge stemming from crashes of two 737 Max jets, a ruling that threatens to unravel an agreement Boeing negotiated to avoid prosecution.

The Tourism Industry Association of Canada has kicked off its 2023 series of Tourism Town Halls. The coast-to-coast road show is designed give tourism stakeholders across the country an opportunity to meet with TIAC and its partners to better understand efforts on national and local tourism issues, and offers a forum for open dialogue, discussion, and constructive debate.

Porter Airlines is relaunching its VIPorter loyalty program with additional membership levels, added benefits, and the enhanced ability for economy travellers to earn perks. The upgrades coincide with Porter’s new Embraer E195-E2 jet service on Feb. 1.

Jamaica or Jupiter, Mexico or the moon? Travel sellers may one day have more options to offer clients as Canada begins the process of expanding its commercial space launch capabilities.

German airline Lufthansa said it has submitted an offer for a minority stake in Italy’s ITA Airways, formerly Alitalia. The Italian finance ministry said in a statement that the Lufthansa offer was the only one submitted by the Jan. 17 deadline.

The US Department of Transportation has fined the British airline Virgin Atlantic US $1.05 million for operating flights carrying the Delta Airlines flight code (DL) in prohibited airspace over Iraq. The Federal Aviation Authority has banned US carriers from operating at certain altitudes over Iraq.

Airport operators should get back to basics and focus their attention on getting people onto their flights rather than trying to get them to go shopping, reveals new consumer research. The strongest demand by survey respondents was for better and faster check-in options, identified by more than 30% of the sample as the top priority.

A Qantas flight travelling from New Zealand to Sydney landed safely on a single engine after it issued a mayday call over the Pacific Ocean on Wednesday.

US airline executives bristled last year when American government officials, led by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, blamed the carriers for causing thousands of flight cancellations and mistreating their customers. The shoe is on the other foot now after the technology outage at the Federal Aviation Administration, which grounded planes for a time last week.

Officials are investigating a close call at New York’s Kennedy International Airport Friday night in which an American Airlines plane crossed a runway in front of an oncoming Delta Air Lines plane appeared to have occurred when the American Airlines pilots misconstrued directions from air traffic controllers.

Nepalese authorities on Tuesday began returning to families the bodies of victims of a flight that crashed Sunday, and said they were sending the aircraft’s data recorder to France for analysis as they try to determine what caused the country’s deadliest plane accident in 30 years.

Global air passenger traffic will reach pre-pandemic levels by June. Asia, led by China, will drive growth in 2023 as one in every two seats of airline capacity now being added is in Asia, according to aircraft leasing company Avolon’s 2023 Outlook.

Thousands of flights across the US were cancelled or delayed Wednesday after a government system that offers safety and other information to pilots broke down, stranding some planes on the ground for hours.

The latest statement from the FAA at 08:50 EST said, “Normal air traffic operations are resuming gradually across the United States following an overnight outage to the FAA’s Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system that provides safety information to flight crews. The ground stop has been lifted. The agency continues to look into the cause of the initial problem.”

Icelandic low-cost airline ‘Play’ says it is expanding to Canada. The Reykjavik-based carrier says it will offer flights from Canada to 26 European destinations including London, Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen, Dublin, Brussels, Stockholm, and Gothenburg.

With its flights running on a roughly normal schedule again, Southwest Airlines is now turning its attention to repairing its damaged reputation after it cancelled 16,700 flights around Christmas and left holiday travellers stranded.

About 1,500 checked bags remain unclaimed at Vancouver International Airport after winter storms wrecked havoc on holiday travel last month, causing hundreds of flights to be cancelled in and out of the airport as heavy snow, then freezing rain, covered Metro Vancouver, leaving many people to sleep on the airport floor for days.

New Democrat Leader Jagmeet Singh says the holiday travel woes that left thousands of passengers stranded at airports or struggling to find flights home show why there should be more competition in Canada’s airspace.

IATA has added its voice to the list of opponents to travel testing for travellers from China with the association’s director general calling the measures “knee jerk,” ineffective, and based on politics, not science.

British rail workers are staging a fresh round of strikes – the first of 2023 – that will disrupt services all week. Around half of the UK’s railway lines are closed, and only one-fifth of services are running amid a long-running dispute over pay and working conditions. Many places, including most of Scotland and Wales, have no train services.

Some passengers who have flown out of Toronto Pearson during the frantic holiday season say they’ve waited days for their bags to show up at their destinations, with little communication on the status of their luggage. Images from Pearson airport show hundreds of lone bags piled up at the airport after major winter storms caused days of flight delays cancellations, leaving many holiday travellers stranded.

A day after most US airlines had recovered from the storm, Southwest Airlines again scrubbed thousands of flights Tuesday in the aftermath of the massive winter storm that wrecked Christmas travel plans across the US, and the federal government said it would investigate why the company lagged so far behind other carriers. Those flights accounted for more than 80% of the 3,000 trips that got cancelled nationwide Tuesday, according to tracking service FlightAware.

Porter Airlines received an early Christmas present with the delivery of the first two of 50 Embraer E195-E2 ordered by the airline at a ceremony Dec. 21 at Embraer’s headquarters in Brazil. In the run up to the new year, Embraer will deliver a further three aircraft to Porter.

Air Transat is the least dissed domestic airline in 2022 by consumers at just over two (2.2) complaints per 100 flights flown, according to the Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA), which has published a new dashboard that tallies the grievances. At the more dubious end of the scale, Flair Airlines racked up the most moans per century at 13.7.