The Week in Brief 6 October 2011

The ACCC has granted authorisation for a Joint Business Agreement between Qantas and American Airlines. The airlines will coordinate operations on services between Australia/New Zealand and the United States and on their respective services which support these trans-Pacific routes. “The ACCC does not consider that the JBA will have any anti-competitive effects, as Qantas and American Airlines do not currently provide any overlapping direct services on the trans-Pacific routes,” ACCC chairman Rod Sims said.

Rex is to start Newcastle to Sydney services from the end of October, with 38 weekly flights providing a one-way fare of $99. The airline will also connect Newcastle and Ballina for the summer season with a daily return flight.

Sydney Airport's media man Michael Samaras has left SACL to do some travelling. He expects to be back in Sydney mid 2012.

CANSO, the Civil Air Navigation Services Organisation, has announced a major new event for the air traffic management (ATM) industry: the ‘CANSO World ATM Congress in association with ATCA,’ launching in Madrid, 12-14 February 2013. ‘CANSO World’ (www.cansoworld.org) aims to be the definitive annual event for ATM, combining a large-scale industry exhibition, thought-leadership conference, and senior-level, international networking opportunities for aviation decision-makers and managers.

British Airways is to open up its one-day emergency safety course to individual passengers next year. The airline started the courses five years ago to cater for corporate clients and around 11,000 people have so far been through it.

It seems the fastest way to board passengers onto a plane may be part rocket science. Dr Jason Steffen, an astrophysicist at Fermi National Laboratory in Illinois, suggests that loading passengers by row, window first seats, then middle seats, then aisle, importantly starting from the back, is the quickest way. CNN reports that the method was tested on a TV show, using 72 luggage-carrying volunteers and a B757 mock-up. It took the volunteers three minutes and 36 seconds.

A US company has won a US$1.3 million prize from NASA for developing a highly efficient aircraft powered by electricity. The plane, developed by Pipistrel, doubled the fuel efficiency requirement for the competition, flying more than 320 km in less than two hours while using just over a half a gallon of fuel per occupant. The Pipistrel Taurus G4 is a four-seat, twin-fuselage aircraft powered by a 145 kw brushless electric motor driving a two-blade propeller mounted on a spar between the fuselages.

How huge is huge? Beijing’s Daxing airport, currently under construction 50km southwest of the city, will be the Chinese capital’s third airport. It will also potentially service Tianjin and Hebei Province. Due to open in 2015, the nine-runway Daxing sprawls over 54sq km and  is expected to handle up to 200 million passengers a year, almost three times the throughput of London Heathrow. By comparison, Beijing Capital International Airport has a 75-million passengers capacity and was only two million short of that maximum last year.