July 14, 2022

Emirates Tells Heathrow Where to Stick its Passenger Cap

London/Heathrow said earlier this week it is imposing a cap of 100,000 passengers per day through September 11 to help stave off operational disaster. As of now, an average of about 101,500 passengers are booked through the rest of the summer, and the airport is asking airlines to cut some passengers or move them to other flights and hold off on selling tickets.

Emirates responded by telling the airport where it could stick its passenger cap, rejecting the passenger limit imposed by the airport. The carrier said it finds Heathrow’s stance to be “entirely unreasonable and unacceptable,” and that it will continue to do right by its customers. Emirates has operated six daily A380 flights since last fall and plans to continue through the summer.

The airline went on to blast Heathrow’s management team for every decision it made since last year. It said the airport chose not to act, plan, or invest, and now created an “airmageddon” due to their incompetence and are trying to push the burden of their gaffe onto airlines and passengers. So the question now is…who blinks first? Emirates or Heathrow?

United and Its Pilots Back to the Drawing Board

United Airlines and its unit of the Air Line Pilots Association agreed to reopen negotiations due to UA’s pilots being unhappy with the deal agreed to last month. The union suspended voting on the existing agreement – which was supposed to close tomorrow – and will survey pilots about their main concerns before the negotiations resume.

The rank-and-file of the union weren’t thrilled about the deal when it was first agreed on, but were then very upset about it when AA’s new contract with its pilots dwarfed United’s deal. Negotiations on the new deal could take about three months, or about how long it takes to get through security in Amsterdam this summer.

WestJet IT Outage Slows Operation

If it’s not one thing, it’s another for airlines this summer. WestJet is suffering an IT outage that’s slowing down the carrier’s airport check-in process, flight planning, website, and flight operations. Other than that, things are going fine.

The reason for the outage isn’t known at this point, although unconfirmed reports say a jar of maple syrup was accidentally spilt in the carrier’s server room and the sticky deliciousness has caused the issue. Check-in was restored and back functional at about 12 p.m. ET today, but self-serve baggage drop was not functional in Calgary, Ottawa, Saskatoon, or Halifax, but that likely wasn’t a big deal because none of those are important airports for WestJet.

Several flights have been canceled today with over 100 delayed, or as JetBlue calls it, a good day. The airport hopes to have everything back functional by this evening with the issues slowly resolving themselves throughout the day.

  • Air Serbia plans to serve Chicago/O’Hare from Belgrade in the spring.
  • American is temporarily banning non-rev travel to London/Heathrow due to LHR’s current summer capacity cap. Emirates has issued no such order.
  • Empire Airlines took delivery of its first Cessna 408 Freighter under a dry-lease agreement with FedEx.
  • Fly2Sky applied for a permit to launch cargo and charter service to the United States.
  • Kenya Airways finalized lease terms on 12 airplanes.
  • Mokulele is adding two 30-seat Saab 340s.
  • PNG Air will release a jpeg of its financial books by the end of next month.
  • SAS is losing $9-$12 million per day.
  • Virgin Atlantic unveiled its fancy new business class.

I bought some cheese today at the grocery, but when I got home and unwrapped it, the cheese spoke to me. It said “I’m depressed and sad, can you make me feel better?”

“Damn,” I thought to myself, “I guess I accidentally bought blue cheese.”