Posts tagged "flight-test"
WestJet has confirmed the last of its densified Boeing 737 cabins is gone and its former Swoop and Sunwing jets have been rebuilt around a 174-seat layout. The retreat, triggered by a viral video, is the clearest evidence yet that there is a floor under economy legroom.
easyJet will end all flying from Leeds Bradford in early January 2027, closing a presence that began in 2010. Because it was only the airport's fifth-largest operator, the retreat says more about how thoroughly Jet2 and Ryanair have taken the airport than about Yorkshire demand.
DIAL is finalising a 2026–2036 master plan that would lift Indira Gandhi International from about 106 million passengers a year to 140 million, built around a new Pier E at Terminal 3, a long-stalled airside train, and a Terminal 4 that eventually replaces T2.
Air China flew a COMAC C919 from Beijing to Ulaanbaatar on 12 August, the type's first scheduled international passenger service. It got there on a bilateral airworthiness arrangement rather than Western certification — which is both the achievement and the ceiling.
The first Airbus A350F emerged from the Toulouse paint shop on 19 August wearing a fuselage-length parcel livery, with Airbus targeting a maiden flight around 24 September. A 107-aircraft backlog and a hardening ICAO emissions deadline both ride on the certification campaign that follows.
NOTAM A476/26 keeps Pakistani airspace shut to Indian-registered aircraft until 24 September, the sixteenth rollover since April 2025. The detours are now a structural cost line for Indian carriers, and they are showing up in network decisions.
Avinor closed Oslo Gardermoen to scheduled traffic between 06:30 and 11:30 on Sunday as a walkout by 12 Norwegian air traffic controllers wiped out most of the morning departure bank. A second strike phase is set for 25 August.
Between 15 and 21 August 2026, Germany's BFU opened inquiries into two separate widebody events on the same Munich runway within 48 hours, while two long-haul jets declared emergencies for hydraulic problems and a fatal midair collision at an uncontrolled Pennsylvania airfield drew NTSB investigators.
India's regulator is preparing to lift mandatory random psychoactive-substance screening of airline crew from 10 per cent to more than 25 per cent a year, weeks after an Air India captain returned a positive confirmatory test. Pilots want saliva testing and procedural safeguards added at the same time.
The Eleventh Circuit vacated the Transportation Department's order stripping Delta and Aeroméxico of antitrust immunity, calling the agency's reasoning arbitrary and capricious. The joint venture and its immunity stay in place.
The US Department of Transportation has again postponed enforcement of the core provisions of its 2024 wheelchair rule, this time to April 30, 2027. Two years after it was written, the most consequential passenger-experience regulation of the decade still has no teeth.
The 2026-2028 Global Aviation Safety Plan lists turbulence encounters among its global risk categories for the first time. US accident data shows who actually gets hurt: flight attendants, four times more often than passengers.