Lufthansa, TAP Portugal, Turkish, Brussels Airlines targeted in EC codeshare probe

By -
The European Commission announced Friday that it has launched formal antitrust investigations into the free-flow codeshare agreements between Lufthansa and Turkish Airlines on the Munich-Istanbul Ataturk and Frankfurt-IST routes and between Brussels Airlines and TAP Portugal on the Brussels-Lisbon route. The two investigations are separate. All four airlines are members of Star Alliance.

"While codeshare agreements can provide substantial benefits to passengers, some types of such agreements may also produce anti-competitive effects," the EC said in a statement, noting it had opened the investigations on its own initiative. "These investigations focus on a particular type of codesharing arrangement where these airlines have agreed to sell seats on each others' flights on the Germany-Turkey routes and on the Belgium-Portugal routes, where both companies already operate their own flights between their own hubs ('parallel hub-to-hub codesharing') and should, in principle, be competing with each other."

LH and THY are the major operators on the MUN-IST and FRA-IST routes while SN and TAP are the only operators on the BRU-LIS route. LH holds a 45% stake in SN, with the option to buy the remaining 55% this year.

The EC pointed out that the investigation does not imply that it has conclusive proof of an infringement.

Source : http://atwonline.com/international-aviation-regulation/news/lufthansa-tap-portugal-turkish-brussels-airlines-targeted-ec-?cid=nl_atw_dn

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should frequent flyers pay for the decarbonization of the air industry?

By -
Image
Researchers are proposing a frequent flyer tax to pay for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the airline industry. A new paper from the International Council on Clean Transportation proposed the tax as a way to fund some of the $121 billion that needs to get invested every year to decarbonize flying. "Varying the levy based on flying frequency focuses the tax burden on wealthier frequent flyers and helps ensure that people with lower incomes are not priced out of air travel because of climate policy," the study's authors, Xinyi Sola Zheng and Dan Rutherford, wrote. A sliding fee for flights beginning at $9 for the second flight and $177 for their twentieth in a given year would raise $121 billion -- versus a flat tax of $25 per ticket for all flights. For the study's authors, the tax is a way to avoid penalizing people in lower income brackets and shifting the load to the wealthiest 10 percent of the world's population. Not only would the revenues come from wea
Read more

Autonomous aviation startup Xwing hits $400M valuation after latest funding round

By -
Image
  The safety pilot has his hands off the controls during an Xwing demonstration flight. Image Credits: Xwing Xwing has scored another win two months after it completed its first gate-to-gate autonomous demonstration flight of a commercial cargo aircraft. The company said Thursday it has raised $40 million at a post-money valuation of $400 million. The company is setting its sights on expansion — not only tripling its engineering team, but eventually running regular fully unmanned commercial cargo flights. Xwing has been developing a technology stack to convert aircraft, including a widely used Cessna Grand Caravan 208B, to function autonomously. But it’s had to solve a few problems first: “the perception problem, the planning problem and the control problem,” Xwing founder Marc Piette explained to TechCrunch. The company has come up with a whole suite of solutions to solve for these problems, including integrating lidar, radar and cameras on the plane; retrofitting the servomotors that
Read more