Week in brief 010410

Japan Airlines is getting out of the dedicated freighter business, with an announcement that it will only carry belly freight from the end of October this year. JAL says that the passenger fleet provides three times the freight capacity of the current freighter fleet anyway. The airline attributes the move to market conditions which is expects to remain "severe".

Preliminary AAPA figures for February show further pickup in both passenger and freight demand, with the region's airlines carrying 16.9 per cent more pax than for the same month last year. And the average load factor for the month was 79.2 per cent. Air cargo was up 29.8 per cent month-on-month.

Garuda is 'back to Europe' from 2 June when it inaugurates its Jakarta-Dubai-Amsterdam service, employing two-class A330-200s carrying 222 passengers. The airline says that wants to grow its international network by more than 300 per cent by 2014 - including more European ports such as Frankfurt, Paris, Rome and London. And from 2011 it plans to make the services non-stop, when it takes delivery of the first of 10 B777-300ERs.

At a major safety conference in Montreal this week, ICAO defined the challenge for the coming years as that of further reducing an already impressive accident rate to counter growth:

"At approximately 4 accidents per million flights and 0.062 fatal accidents per million flights, rates are low but unfortunately stable given the increase in traffic in the coming decade and beyond, which could translate into a potential increase in accidents."

And regional differences in the accident rate were described as "unacceptably high, with one region over twice the global average". No prizes for guessing which region that is...

The Australian Government has decided to ban even hush-kitted B727s from our skies from 1 September. The ban on what have been described as "marginally compliant" aircraft (including the AN124, which makes occasional forays into local airports) will exclude emergency flights or those classified as in the public interest. Clearly the move mostly affects freight operators, but as it covers more than 600 annual movements it is not without some significance for both operators and residents under flight paths.

Viva Macau appears to have disappeared from the skies, after grounding its fleet last weekend because of "fuel payment issues". In other words an embarrassing cash position. When the airline then failed to cooperate adequately with Macau government entities its AOC was revoked. The Macau Government has said it plans to go to the courts to recover around US$24 million it had advanced to the airline over the last couple of years. No one at Viva Macau is talking.

And Ryanair and OnAir are not talking either. The two have parted company after a year or so of providing in-flight connectivity to around 50 of the carrier's aircraft. Apparently Ryanair wanted to extend the service to its entire fleet, but the two parties were unable to agree terms. OnAir says it is moving on and plans to launch services with six more carriers this year.