Aviation Report

LONDON: Extreme winter weather swept across western Europe on Saturday, leaving thousands of passengers stranded at London's main international airport and claiming several lives in Spain, Portugal, Scotland and France, including those of three Mali-bound soldiers. The frigid temperatures also caused delays and cancellations on major railway lines including the Eurostar train service, and transport authorities warned of further traffic disruptions with more blizzards forecast for Sunday. In London, thousands of passengers were forced to camp out on the floor at Heathrow Airport overnight as hundreds of flights to and from the British capital were cancelled. "There are lots of bodies lying around in the airport. If feels like there's been a natural disaster," Jerry Meng from Los Angeles, whose flight to New York was cancelled, told the BBC. London's other main airports, Gatwick and Stansted, managed to operate fairly normally Saturday. For Sunday, t

Air fares are an average of 5% lower for tickets purchased on weekends than for comparable tickets bought during the week—or at least that was the case in the fourth quarter of 2004, the period for which Steven L. Puller and Lisa M. Taylor of Texas A&M University studied sales for six U.S. airlines. The companies may believe that people booking flights on weekends are more likely to be leisure travelers, who are more sensitive to prices than business fliers, the researchers say. Source: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016726811200203X

Paul Lewis, spokesperson of Boeing in Seattle told eTN: We're working with our client ANA Airlines and regulatory s authority to assist in this issue. We don’t have any more details to share at this point.” Boeing has no further comments and referred eTN to ANA. Media relations for ANA did not answer phone calls, and reservation phone numbers were unable to handle calls to rebook clients stranded by ANA's suspension of all Dreamliner Boeing 787 services by the Japanese carrier. An All Nippon 787 made an emergency landing in Japan today because of smoke coming from the aircraft, prompting the decision to ground its entire fleet for the first time, said Ryosei Nomura, a spokesman for Tokyo-based All Nippon. Japan Air will also idle its fleet today. The carriers didn’t say for how long the planes will be grounded. Today’s All Nippon flight left at 8 a.m. local time from Ube airport in Yamaguchi prefecture, southern Japan, bound for Tokyo’s Haneda airport, Nomura said. T

The crew of a Japan Airlines Dreamliner loaded with 181 passengers apparently was unaware of fuel spewing from a wing as the jetliner prepared to thunder down the runway on Tuesday in Boston. It was only due to an alert from the pilot of another plane that Flight 7's takeoff for Tokyo was abandoned and the Boeing 787 towed to the gate, the second problem in two days for a JAL Dreamliner at Logan International Airport. An electrical fire on Monday damaged an empty Dreamliner on the same tarmac. The unusual twin incidents added to service questions about the highly touted plane that experienced a very difficult development and clearly has growing pains, according to safety experts. Boeing's chief project engineer for the 787 said in a conference call with reporters Wednesday that he is "100 percent convinced the airplane is safe to fly." "There are issues we have seen that we will need to work through, and just like any new airplane program we work th