The Canadian government has approved Air Canada’s takeover of vacation specialist Transat AT, subject to numerous conditions. The two companies, which announced the deal in August 2019 and had planned for the transaction to close in mid-2020, clear a major hurdle with the government approval, but are still awaiting a verdict from European regulators before they can proceed. Since then, the coronavirus has disrupted the aviation industry worldwide, and the precipitous decline in business prompted Air Canada last October to slash the price it was willing to pay for its Montreal-based peer to C$5 ($3.94) per share from its original offer of C$18 per share. Transat’s shareholders overwhelmingly approved the new offer in December, seeing it as a lifeline for the ailing company. The deal was set to expire in four days, on 15 February. “Given the devastating impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the air industry, the proposed purchase of Transat AT by Air Canada will bring greater stability to Canada’s air transport market,” the country’s minister of transport Omar Alghabra, says on 11 February. “It will be accompanied by strict conditions which will support future international competition, connectivity and protect jobs. We are confident these measures will be beneficial to travellers and the industry as a whole.” Some of those conditions imposed by the government include maintaining the head office and brand in the French-speaking province of Quebec, as well as 1,500 jobs, a commitment to maintain the airline’s aircraft in Canada (preferably in Quebec), the launch of new destinations within the first five years, and what the government calls “a price monitoring mechanism”. In addition, the airline must “facilitate and encourage other airlines to take up former Transat AT routes to Europe”. This seems to imply that Transat will be giving up its transatlantic routes as part of the deal. Prior to the pandemic, Air Transat was flying to France, Portugal, Spain and the UK. Neither Transat nor Air Canada immediately responded to requests for comment on the decision. The acquisition, the government says, “offers the best probable outcomes for workers, for Canadians seeking service and choice in leisure travel to Europe, and for other Canadian industries that rely on air transport, particularly aerospace.” With today’s approval by Canadian competition authorities, the airlines are now waiting for the European Commission to give its blessing to the tie-up.

Preliminary findings from the Sriwijaya Boeing 737-500 crash probe increasingly support an in-flight upset scenario in which the crew was suddenly caught out by the insidious development of an asymmetric thrust condition. No conclusions have been drawn over the 9 January accident. But the highly-unusual retardation of a single throttle lever to idle during a climb – with no immediate indication that the crew was aware – will intensify suspicion of an autothrottle problem, particularly given its history of a repetitive technical malfunction in the week before the accident. Sriwijaya Air has issued an internal safety recommendation reminding pilots to maintain awareness during critical phases of flight and write detailed reports of any aircraft maintenance issues, in order to support engineers’ effort to rectify them. It has also reminded technical personnel to “increase discipline” in regard to following aircraft maintenance processes and procedures. The aircraft had departed Jakarta’s runway 25R on the ABASA 2D departure pattern, requiring a sharp right turn upon reaching 1,000ft to a heading of 081°. Investigation authority KNKT’s initial findings reveal that the left-hand thrust lever, for reasons yet to be determined, started to retard as the jet climbed through 8,150ft. The right-hand lever remained in position. The crew requested a heading of 075°, citing a weather deviation. But while the aircraft subsequently started to turn right, its track suggests it never managed to complete the alignment with the heading. The inquiry has yet to clarify whether this was connected with the developing thrust asymmetry. With the thrust imbalance the autopilot would probably have been trying to compensate for a tendency to yaw and roll left by commanding right-aileron input. Although the crew was instructed to level off at 11,000ft, to avoid a traffic conflict, the aircraft had not even reached this altitude before it started to turn to the left, as the left-hand thrust lever continued to retreat. At 10,900ft and a heading of 016° the autopilot disengaged and the aircraft rolled steeply to the left, with a bank of 45°, and entered a rapid descent. Full circumstances of the upset have still to become clear, particularly given that the cockpit-voice recorder remains unrecovered. But the initial findings suggest parallels with a fatal China Southern Airlines 737-300 accident near Guilin in November 1992. The aircraft had been experiencing an autothrottle problem affecting its right-hand engine and, during the descent to Guilin, the left-hand throttle lever advanced as the aircraft transitioned to level flight but the right-hand lever did not. This led to a thrust asymmetry under which the aircraft tended to yaw and roll to the right, corrected by the autopilot with left aileron input. But a limit to the aileron deflection meant the autopilot eventually was unable to overcome the effect of the thrust imbalance, and the aircraft started to roll slowly to the right. Control-column input suddenly cut off the autopilot’s counteraction, the jet’s right roll rapidly accelerated, and the upset resulted in the crew’s losing control. KNKT has not provided details of the Sriwijaya 737’s airspeed, nor has it disclosed the readings from instruments including the engine indicators. It says that it will review the history of the autothrottle maintenance, examine the pilots’ training for upset prevention and recovery, and analyse the split in the thrust levers to identify its cause. Boeing 737-300s, -400s and -500s were the subject of an airworthiness directive in 2001 which focused on upgrading autothrottle computers following incidents of asymmetric thrust conditions in flight caused by the thrust levers’ slowly moving apart, causing the aircraft to bank excessively and enter a roll. But the US FAA set a compliance time of 18 months for carriers to implement the change, suggesting this upgrade had taken place while the Sriwijaya aircraft – manufactured in 1994 – was still in operation with US carrier Continental Airlines.

Ethiopian Airlines is making slow progress with talks regarding co-operation with South African Airways (SAA), according to the former’s chief executive Tewolde Gebremariam. The Addis Ababa-based carrier said in October last year that it was willing to provide “planes, pilots and maintenance services” to ailing SAA as part of a “joint venture” with the country’s government, but noted that it did not wish to take on legacy issues such as debts. Speaking during a CAPA Live session today, Gebremariam says that talks with South Africa’s government “have been a challenge so far”. “We are still discussing, but I would say it has not made the expected progress,” he states. Explaining Ethiopian’s strategic thinking regarding a potential SAA tie-up, Gebremariam notes that South Africa’s origin and destination-focused traffic means its is a very different proposition to the hub-based model at Addis Ababa. That dominance means South Africa is “very, very competitive… because every mega-carrier in the world is there”, Gebremariam observes. “To succeed in that market, one has to be inside South Africa,” he states. Ethiopian, which has a history of investments in other African carriers, therefore believes that “the only way we can look at opportunities, is if we cooperate with South African Airways”, says Gebremariam. SAA is being restructured as part of a rescue plan that also sets out ambitions to find a strategic equity partner for the carrier.