Loganair, the UK's largest regional carrier, is being offered for sale by its owners after a decade under their control. The Scottish carrier, which has its main base in Glasgow but operates across the UK, is being put up for sale “for the best of reasons”, writes chief executive Jonathan Hinkles. The joint owners, brothers Peter and Stephen Bond, are seeking to step back from the business as Stephen Bond heads for retirement. "What is very clear is that Stephen and Peter Bond are committed to finding the right future owner for Loganair – very much its keeper for the next generation, just as they themselves have been," Hinkles adds in a LinkedIn post. Loganair has had mixed fortunes over recent years, in line with much of the industry, and has benefited from the wider recovery out of the pandemic. For the full year to end-March 2021 it posted revenue of £81 million ($110 million) and a pre-tax loss of £5.6 million. In the year to end-March 2022, the carrier doubled annual revenue to £161 million and made profit of £9 million, reports The Sunday Times, and forecasts this to rise 150% to £240 million this year, generating earnings of more than £15 million. "With Loganair performing strongly as the UK's largest regional airline, our fleet renewal programme entering the home straight and soon to publish annual results which surpass those of any other UK airline which has reported thus far, our airline is firmly set on the most positive of paths for the future," writes Hinkles. Loganair has a fleet of 46 aircraft, data shows, with its 14 Embraer ERJ-145s and 12 ATR turboprops forming the backbone of its passenger fleet. The fleet is part leased and part owned or managed directly by Loganair. As well as offering scheduled passenger services, the airline performs mail transport services and contracts to connect oil and gas terminals with the mainland.

Bamboo Airways has taken delivery of a new Airbus A321neo ACF, bringing its fleet to 30 aircraft, including three widebodies from Boeing, 22 narrowbodies from Airbus and five regional jets from Embraer. The Vietnamese carrier says its A321neo is equipped with CFM International Leap-1A32 engines and features 223 seats including eight business seats and 215 economy seats. Bamboo Airways aims to operate a fleet of 42 aircraft by 2023 and 100 by 2030 "if favourable conditions allow". Board chairman Nguyen Ngoc Trong states: "Expanding the fleet scale is among our prioritys targets to serve a vigorously expanding international flight network to countries in Europe, Australia, Northeast Asia, and the USA. At the same time, this contributes to improving our service quality, meeting market demands, and boosting Bamboo Airways' competitiveness because the global aviation industry is strongly recovering from the epidemic." Bamboo Airways says it is also focusing on developing long-haul nonstop international routes and connecting major continental gateway airports.

The US policy of incentivising sustainable aviation fuel production is a smarter, more effective method of increasing supply than Europe’s mandate system, according to SAS chief executive Anko van der Werff. Speaking at the Aviation Festival in Amsterdam on 5 October, he says the problem around SAF is not one of demand but supply, as “there is not an airline chief executive today who would not like to buy more SAF”. He believes that incentives are therefore a far better way to encourage production than penalising carriers that cannot meet certain targets. “There are lots of initiatives [to produce SAF in Europe] but the funding for those should be more positive rather than negative, but that’s a difference between the United States with its incentives, rather than utilisation penalties and taxation that we have in Europe,” he says. “I do think the US model works better to make sure that in three, four, five years we will be in a better shape than today.” The EU has mandated that airlines operating from the block must use SAF for at least 5% of their fuel departing flights starting in 2030. This approach has come in for heavy criticism for pushing up the price of the fuel, but not necessarily production. SAF already typically costs several times more that standard jet fuel. In contrast, the USA has adopted a series of credits that encourage the use of SAF, but do not penalise carriers that eschew the product. Van der Werff continued that as a Scandinavian airline, SAS is already working to a 2% SAF mandate, operating in markets that have pushed the issue “faster and earlier than anywhere else”. By 2030, he notes, both Denmark and Sweden are mandating that domestic air travel must be carbon neutral. “We will get there and we can get there,” he says. He continues that with future low-carbon technologies, such as electric aircraft and hydrogen power, being decades away the industry has no choice but to turn to SAF to decarbonise its operations. Van der Werff also expresses a desire for greater co-operation between airlines on the issue. “I think it is ludicrous that we are competing on this,” he says. “We are competing for the planet so we should be looking at the same solutions.”