Aviation

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.