Azerbaijan Airlines has indefinitely suspended all flights from Baku to the Russian city of Kazan. The carrier says the decision has been made to ensure flight safety following recent regular closures of airspace over the city. It adds that it "continues to monitor the current situation closely".

The president of Venezuela's state-owned carrier Conviasa, Ramon Velasquez Araguayan, is among eight officials added to the US Treasury Department's sanctions list for their role in supporting the regime of the country's president Nicolas Maduro. The Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) says Velasquez has served as Maduro's transportation minister since May 2023 while also helming the carrier, which is also under US sanctions. Others affected by the 10 January sanctions included officials from other state-owned oil companies plus police and military officials "who lead key economic and security agencies enabling Nicolas Maduro’s repression and subversion of democracy in Venezuela," OFAC states. The announcement coincided with Maduro being sworn in for a third term as president on 10 January and are part of a coordinated action with the European Union, Canada and the UK. However, the US is the only one of those jurisdictions that has individually sanctioned Velasquez. According to a 2 January article in The Economist, Maduro's inauguration will "defy the popular will" as in July "a clear majority of Venezuelans voted against him, only for the electoral authority, which the regime controls, to declare that Mr Maduro had won the election with 52% of the vote". Conviasa has 21 aircraft in service, comprised of nine Embraer 190-E1s, seven Cessna 208B Grand Caravans, four Airbus A340s and one A319 corporate jet, fleet data shows. A further nine aircraft, including six E190s and two A340s, are listed as stored. The airline manages all of its aircraft itself, although four A340s are owned by Iran's Mahan Air. Data shows that the carrier has a limited international network from Caracas to Bridgetown, Santa Cruz, Havana, Managua, Cancun and Mexico City, and operates on several domestic routes.

Investigators probing the fatal crash of a Jeju Air Boeing 737-800 will look to other evidence to uncover the cause of the accident after confirming that the two key data recorders were found missing vital data from minutes before it crashed. “The analysis results showed that all data from the CVR [cockpit voice recorder] and FDR [flight data recorder] were lost in the four minutes before the aircraft hit the localiser,” states the country’s ministry of land, infrastructure and transportation in an 11 January update. The localiser refers to the concrete structure at the end of Muan International airport that the aircraft crashed. The accident resulted in 179 deaths with all but two surviving crew members. While the ministry concedes that data from the recorders are “important”, investigation and analysis of other data are also conducted during an accident investigation, adding that “we plan to do our best to accurately determine the cause of the accident”. Investigators will likewise investigate why the recorders did not record the final minutes before the fatal crash, it says. The CVR will be transported to the US for “cross-validation” with the FDR, says the ministry. The FDR – which was found with a damaged power connector – was sent to the US on 6 January after local authorities deemed they were unable to extract data from it. At the same time, South Korean authorities have completed safety inspections on Boeing 737-800s across six airlines and plans to expand the investigation to other aircraft types operated by 11 airlines from 13-31 January. The investigation into 737-800s, meanwhile, found that airlines were “generally complying with the operation and maintenance regulations,” according to a 13 January statement from the ministry. However, it found that “some airlines” exceeded “pre- and post- flight inspection cycles” and did not comply with “defect resolution procedure” and “passenger boarding procedure”. Examples include airlines exceeding the 48-hour timeframe for pre- and post- flight inspection for international flights, replacing one instead of all four filters when an aircraft’s hydraulic system's electric motor pump overheat indicator was lit, and boarding passengers before maintenance checks were completed. “Major improvement measures include incorporating and regularising training for multiple engine failures in training manuals, including bird strike response procedures in pre-flight briefings, and reviewing methods to standardize and periodically manage aircraft availability rate calculations,” adds the ministry. The ministry has also concluded its inspection of "the location and materials of navigation safety facilities around runways" at airports across the country, and found facilities “well maintained”, with most using “breakable” materials to ensure safety. However, “improvements were found to be necessary” for localiser facilities and their foundations at seven airports with concrete and steel structure, including Muan airport. The ministry is also launching a safety inspection of the country's major airports between 13-21 January.