Okie dokie, let’s get this week’s news round-up going as we’ve got a lot to get through! Our tour will bring you to Singapore, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Moscow and London. It’s obviously been a news week from around the world!
Wow, what a busy aviation week this one has been! While 2,700 representatives from 300 airlines and 800 airports (BreakingTravelNews.com) gathered in Berlin at the annual ‘World Routes’ event, airports and travellers around the globe continued to work like clockwork. All of them? Not really, this week saw airports from Cairo to Sydney struggling through many problems.
This week has been very busy for one country in the Southern Hemisphere: Australia. In one of the busiest week’s in the country’s annual calendar, when school holidays are in full swing and the Grand Final of the footy and rugby leagues are played out, the Australian aviation industry went through a lot of turbulence.
It’s been another busy week for airports around the world. And once again we have seen the full spectrum of news articles coming in: everything from small animals delaying flights at one of the busiest airports in the world to an “animal-named” airline being grounded due to safety concerns. Oh and then there’s the one with new bathrooms too. But let’s start at the beginning:
It’s surely been a week from hell for many travellers in Australia and New Zealand as the ash cloud from the Puyehue volcano, high in Chile’s Andes, disrupted air traffic first in New Zealand, then over in Australia in Hobart (IATA: HBA), Melbourne (IATA: MEL; LD reviewed) and Adelaide (IATA: ADL; LD reviewed) before moving further east and affecting Perth in Western Australia (IATA: PER) later in the week. Interesting was that there were massive differences whether flights were cancelled or not depending on the individual airline. Qantas took the cautious approach and grounded most of its flights on affected routes whereas its competitors Virgin Australia and Tiger Airways argued they could take routes avoiding the ash or fly below the cloud. In an email to its frequent fliers, Qantas CEO Alan Joyce backed his airlines decision on the fact that “unlike the meteorological authorities in Europe, Australia’s [Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre] VAAC does not have the ability to calculate ash density so we are unable to access definitive measurements.”
Welcome to an entirely new section of LateDeparture! This little weekly review aims at giving you an overview of what happened in the world of airports over the past seven days; every week. Of course, in true LateDeparture fashion, I will specifically focus on airport developments and non-developments (read: delays). If, however, you’re after official on-time performance reports, you’re at the wrong spot. In that case you may want to try this site instead. Everyone else, please read on;-)
First of all, the harsh winter weather continued in many parts around the US and therefore added further delays across a number of US airports. Texas received a hit on Wednesday when more than 400 flights at Dallas-Ft. Worth International Airport (IATA: DFW) were cancelled as reported in the Wall Street Journal.
Your Alarm is set for 4:30am – you are sure of it because you’ve checked it 20 times along with any other household appliance that keeps time & can promise you a morning that you WON’T sleep in! Here goes … Zzzzzz .. ling ling .. buzz buzz .. honk honk .. and you spring out of bed like a lightning bolt and the run begins…