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Vueling won the accolade of most innovative low cost model airline at the industry’s ‘Budgie Awards’.

Industry representatives applauded the efforts the company is making to provide their passengers with a wide range of services at competitive prices. In particular, the sector valued the company’s efforts to implement successfully, since July 2010, a pioneering programme of connecting flights through its hub at Barcelona, initially Vueling to Vueling and its network of flights, and since March this year with legacy carriers, including Iberia. Today, Vueling can offer 550 routes through its Vueling Connects network.

source: traveldailynews.com

In a move that has astonished the airline industry, not to mention EasyJet, Haji-Ioannou is preparing to launch a new airline, Fastjet. There are few further details as yet – simply a single, bright red webpage, Fastjet.com, bearing the message “‘by Stelios. Coming soon!’”.

We don’t yet know what sort of fleet he is planning, whether he has leased any aircraft, which routes Fastjet will fly or whether it will go head to head with EasyJet, in which the billionaire entrepreneur and his family retain a 38 per cent stake.

Haji-Ioannou has been engaged in a long and increasingly bitter battle with EasyJet management on a number of fronts, peace seemed to have broken out between the two sides just last week, when the board bowed to pressure to pay a special dividend to shareholders.

source: irishtimes.com

Aer Lingus has rejected calls by Ryanair, its largest shareholder, for the Irish flag-carrier to pay a special dividend.

Colm Barrington, Aer Lingus chairman, has told Ryanair that the carrier’s board is sticking by its view of May’s annual meeting that a dividend should be considered once a “‘more durable’” economic recovery is apparent.

Aer Lingus and Ryanair have been locked in a fractious relationship since Europe’s largest low-cost airline by revenue launched the first of two failed takeover bids in 2006. Both bids faltered after objections by the Irish government and European competition authorities.

source: FT.com

British Airways spent ­£20million on a new promotion campaign… only to realise a TV advert contained a shot of a rival Virgin Atlantic plane.

Embarrassed bosses ordered an ­emergency edit of the 90-second ad – which uses state-of-the-art computer-generated images to plot the airline’s history – after a member of staff spotted the blunder just a day before its official launch.

One shot, centred around ­the company motto ‘To Fly. To Serve’, shows a row of three British Airways Boeing 747s docked at a terminal. But the nearest displays the ­serial code G-VGAL – the marking of a Virgin Atlantic aircraft based in Manchester.

source: mirror.co.uk

State-owned carrier Emirates Airline is not yet seeing a downturn in business and bookings for the next few months are at high levels, even as other airlines warn stuttering economies are affecting sales.

“‘As yet, fingers crossed, we have not seen any diminution of demand,'” President Tim Clark told this week.

Lufthansa last week warned on profits and said it would offer fewer seats on its planes this winter than previously expected.

source: Reuters

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) warned of tough times ahead for the airline industry and the head of Thai Airways said on Tuesday financial market turmoil as the European and U.S. economies slow down was “‘frightening'”.

IATA has already warned that a weak global economy would prompt a 29-percent fall in airline profits in 2012 and cut the industry’s profit margins to a wafer thin 0.8 percent from 1.2 percent this year.

IATA, whose 230 members carry more than 93 percent of scheduled international air traffic, forecast global economic growth of 2.4 percent in 2012, lower than the International Monetary Fund’s projection of 4.0 percent.

source: foxbusiness.com

Aviation entrepreneur Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou announced plans for Fastjet – a start-up rival for established operators such as Ryanair.

Relations between easyJet and Sir Stelios have been decidedly uneasy in the last 18 months.

Although the tycoon and his family still own 38 per cent of easyJet that he began from scratch in 1995 (with a £5million loan from his shipping-magnate father), discussions between the two parties have been icy since Haji-Ioannou resigned from the carrier’s board in May 2010 in a row over strategy.

source: dailymail.co.uk

United Airlines is shaping up as the next major U.S. battleground for Boeing and Airbus to sell narrowbody airplanes, as the world’s biggest airline mulls an order sources say could reach 200 planes.

Discussions are still at the early stages. But industry sources familiar with preliminary soundings expect United to place an order to refresh its fleet late this year or early next year.

United and Boeing have a shared history, both being founded by William Boeing. United Air Lines and Boeing Airplane Company were both subsidiaries of United Aircraft and Transport Company before it was broken up in 1934. Airbus overtook Boeing as the world’s largest jetliner-maker in 2003.

source: Reuters

Fearing an economic downturn, Germany’s flagship airline Lufthansa is cutting flights and capacity, the company announced on Thursday.

“‘We are removing part of the anticipated additional capacity out of planning, in that we are reducing frequency, cutting some connections, and using smaller airplanes,’” Chairman Carsten Spohr told the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.

It was crucial in these times to take make such decisions early rather than flying through the crisis with empty planes, he added.

source: The Local

Irish budget carrier Ryanair would only be interested in buying Boeing’s 737 MAX jetliner if the upgraded narrowbody jet provided “‘material'” fuel savings, Finance Director Howard Millar said.

Boeing has announced plans to upgrade its best-selling passenger jet to match a project by rival Airbus to put new engines on its competing A320.

Ryanair, Boeing’s biggest customer outside the United States, would have preferred Boeing to offer a completely new aircraft rather than an upgrade to the existing model, he said.

source: Reuters