ATW Daily News

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Monday June 26, 2006

Jet Airways and Air Sahara continued to spar in a Lucknow court Friday over the fate of a INR5 billion ($108.5 million) escrow account tied to Jet's aborted acquisition of its rival (ATWOnline, Jan. 23). After hearing arguments, a judge froze the account and postponed the hearing until June 30, according to Indian press reports. The airlines were debating the Lucknow court's jurisdiction over the case. Air Sahara's attorney told the court that as far as his client was concerned, the merger "is still subsisting. Only Jet is saying that the deal has come to an end," the Press Trust of India reported. "If Jet is allowed to walk away with the money it will sound the death knell for Sahara."

SITA launched what it called the air transport industry's first Voice Exchange, offering much cheaper Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone services as a "secure, efficient and flexible alternative to the legacy Public Switched Telephone Network technology." SITA SC Senior VP-Business Development Relationship Management and New Ventures Rene Azoulai said, "SITA is committed to providing the air transport community with innovative and effective ways of using technology to drive down costs."

SITA said Voice Exchange leverages "the SITA-managed .aero top level domain--in particular the latest Domain Name System technologies such as tElephone NUmber Mapping.ATI for addressing instead of traditional phone numbers." Participating ATI customers will be able to call each other through Voice Exchange using "click-to-call" softphones, IP phones or legacy PBX telephones. "They will be able to dial legacy numbers, but calls will stay within the IP network without touching the legacy PSTNs," the company said.

Boeing has sold 132 747-400s and 747-8s since the beginning of 2000--the timeframe in which the A380 has been offered in the marketplace--including last week's Cathay Pacific order for six 747-400ERFs (ATWOnline, June 23). While the A380 had its industrial launch in 2001, Airbus was gathering MOUs and LOIs through 2000 from Emirates, ILFC and Air France before Singapore Airlines and Qantas committed to the aircraft in late 2000. The order rate for the 747 has picked up in the past 17 months, with 63 orders booked for 10 customers against 20 for the A380. Airbus customers include UPS (10), Kingfisher Airlines (5) and China Southern Airlines (5). While most of the 747 orders have been for the freighter models, a surprising 30 have been passenger versions, including three VIP transports. Boeing has logged 1,439 orders for the 747 family not including the 747-400BCF program.

Separately, Boeing sold another 25 737s to an unidentified customer. So far this year, 18 customers have ordered 338 737s with the buyers of 89 unidentified.

by Geoffrey Thomas

Lockheed Martin reached agreement with Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University to create a multimillion-dollar Airport of the Future testbed in Daytona, Fla. Judy Marks, president of Lockheed's Transportation and Security Solutions division, said Friday in Washington that the venture will involve other companies as well as FAA, which will provide half the funding. The 50/50 public-private project seeks to explore how technology can be deployed at airports to increase the efficiency of airline operations, she said. Funding is included in the FY07 FAA budget proposal. "We want to look at an airport holistically [to create an environment where] all systems are connected and all parties have the same megadata," Marks explained. The project is to be conducted in four stages, each lasting 6-9 months. The first will cover airport surface technology, including perimeter security. The second will focus on runway operations, the third on airspace capacity and the fourth on improving an airport's performance in all weather conditions.

by Aaron Karp

Iberia board last week approved the reorganization of the airline group's top management along with a new management structure. As indicated by Chairman and CEO Fernando Conte to this website during the IATA AGM earlier this month, the position of COO is being eliminated following the resignation of Angel Mullor (ATWOnline, June 6). The restructuring "is designed to achieve two objectives: To reduce the number of senior executives, and to assign greater responsibility to the members of the Executive Committee," Iberia noted. The group's maintenance and handling business units will evolve into "full division status, on a par with the airline division itself." The company will have three GMs: Enrique Donaire will remain head of the airline division, Manuel Lopez Aguilar was appointed GM-maintenance and engineering division and Fernando Sarmentero was named acting GM-airports division. Iberia Group CFO Enrique Dupuy also will take charge of corporate strategy. The executive committee, which reports to the chairman, will have eight members.

United Airlines lost its contract to carry mail for the US Postal Service effective June 30 because of poor ontime performance, according to press reports. It will continue to carry international mail, which constitutes most of its mail business. UA generated nearly $150 million in revenue carrying mail in 2005, according to Form 41 data filed with the US Dept. of Transportation.

EU signed a so-called "horizontal" aviation agreement with New Zealand allowing European airlines to fly between New Zealand and any EU member state. The agreement does not replace the bilateral agreements in place between member states and NZ but brings them in line with EU law by removing nationality restrictions. Similar agreements have been signed with Chile, Singapore, Ukraine, Georgia and several Balkan countries.

Norwegian, which will open its first non-Scandinavian base July 13 in Warsaw (ATWOnline, April 7), announced it will expand its Polish operation with the addition of eight new routes. From Warsaw the LCC will operate a four-times-weekly service to Rome Ciampino from Aug. 10 and four-times-weekly flights to Milan Malpensa, thrice-weekly flights to Athens and Dublin and a daily flight to Stockholm Arlanda, all from Sept. 14. There also will be new four-times-weekly services to Stockholm from Wroclaw and Krakow and a twice-weekly to Oslo from Wroclaw, all from Oct. 28. "We are very satisfied with the response in the Polish market so far...We believe that the new routes from Warsaw and other Polish cities will be very well received," CEO Bjorn Kjos said in a statement.

Qatar Airways boosted its Doha-Bangkok service to twice-daily from ten-times-weekly.

TAM flew 1.49 billion domestic RPKs in May, a 33% increase over the year-ago month. Capacity climbed 20.3% to 2.03 billion ASKs and load factor rose 7 points to 73.4%. International traffic grew 45.8% to 461 million RPKs against a 28.2% increase to 623 million ASKs. Load factor improved 8.9 points to 73.9%.

Delta Air Lines signed a $15 million, five-year agreement for Delta TechOps to provide maintenance work on Icelandair's 767-300 components and provide inventory exchange services.

CSA Czech Airlines plans to improve its business class service on its four A310-300s. The current three-seat configuration will be replaced by a two-seat configuration. CSA said it will add sockets for charging notebook computers and improve video systems. A tender will be announced for the supply of new equipment. The carrier expects the replacement of seats and audiovisual technology to be completed by June 2007.

Separately, CSA named Jan Janik VP-flight operations effective July 1. He replaces Peter Jusko, who will become VP-ground operations.