Vietnam has broken ground for the first phase of a new airport for the city’s commercial centre of Ho Chi Minh City. On 6 January, prime minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc presided over the groundbreaking of phase one of Long Thanh International Airport, located to the east of Ho Chi Minh City. The airport will be developed in three phases at a total investment of D337 billion ($16 billion), says Airports Corporation of Vietnam (ACV). Phase one will see the development of a 4,000m runway in addition to aprons and taxiways, a passenger terminal with annual capacity of 25 million, and cargo terminals with annual capacity of 1.2 million tonnes. ACV says that the first phase is expected to be completed in 2025, with an investment of D109 billion ($4.7 billion). Phase two will see the development of a second runway and terminal. This will bring total capacity to 75 million passengers and 2.7 million tonnes of cargo annually. When complete, it will feature four runways, four passenger terminals, and have a capacity of 100 million passengers and five million tonnes of cargo annually. Located to the north of Ho Chi Minh City, Long Thanh is a crucial element in improving Ho Chi Minh City’s airport capacity. The city’s sole airport at Tan Son Nhat is located in a developed area near the city. Before the coronavirus pandemic it was operating over its designated capacity.

There are signs that a long-running multinational blockade by Arab states against Qatar might be easing, after an agreement was reached to open airspace and other borders between Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The agreement has been disclosed by Kuwaiti foreign affairs minister Ahmed Nasser Al-Muhammad Al-Sabah, on the eve of a Saudi-hosted summit of the Gulf Co-operation Council. Al-Sabah confirms the agreement to open air, sea and land borders and refers to the summit as offering an opportunity for “fraternal relations free of abnormality”. Four countries – Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates – imposed the blockade on Qatari flights and other interests in June 2017. Qatar Airways experienced heavy losses in its fiscal year 2019-20, which ended just before the onset of the deepest impact of the pandemic. It describes the blockade, which it is challenging through ICAO, as “illegal” and stated in its most recent annual report that “little change” had occurred despite the Qatari government’s appeals to international organisations. The Kuwaiti government has served as a mediator in the dispute. Kuwait’s emir, Nawaf Al-Sabah, spoke to Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud and the Qatari emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani ahead of the GCC summit in Al-Ula, due to begin on 5 January. GCC secretary general Nayef Falah Al-Hajraf had formally delivered, at the end of December, an official invitation from the king of Saudi Arabia to the Qatari emir to attend the summit. Saudi Arabia’s crown prince states that the kingdom’s policy is based on a “solid approach” aimed at “achieving the ultimate interests of the GCC member states and the Arab countries”. UAE foreign affairs minister Anwar Gargash describes the Al-Ula summit as “historic”, through which participants will “restore Gulf cohesion”, without referring specifically to the UAE’s policy regarding the blockade on Qatar.

The Federal Aviation Administration will soon require aircraft manufacturers to fully consider how various cockpit warnings might affect the ability of pilots to properly respond to failures. The requirements are laid out in a US funding law that seeks to address many concerns brought forth by two Boeing 737 Max crashes. The law requires the FAA to adopt, within one year, a recommendation from the National Transportation Safety Board that applies to “system safety assessments”. Those assessments are part of a process through which aircraft manufacturers, when designing and certificating aircraft, assign risk levels to various system failures. The risk levels are based on assumptions about how pilots will respond to failures. Within one year, the FAA must require that manufacturers’ safety assessments “consider the effect of all possible flight deck alerts and indications on pilot recognition and response”, the law says. That provision applies specifically to safety assessments that address instances when pilots must take “immediate and appropriate… corrective actions” in response to “uncommanded flight control inputs”. The law also requires that manufacturers take steps to ensure their designs are safe even when pilots respond to failures in unanticipated ways. Additionally, within two years, new aircraft types must have improved flight crew alerting systems. Specifically, aircraft will need an alerting system that “displays and differentiates among warnings, cautions and advisories, and includes functions to assist the flight crew in prioritising corrective actions and responding to systems failures”. The measures seek to address ongoing concerns that pilots can become overwhelmed by, and struggle to properly respond to, failures of advanced aircraft systems. The NTSB’s report into the two Max crashes notes that Boeing’s safety assessments for that jet “did not evaluate all the potential alerts and indications that could accompany a failure” of the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS). “The assumptions that Boeing used in its functional hazard assessment of uncommanded MCAS function for the 737 Max did not adequately consider and account for the impact that multiple flight deck alerts and indications could have on pilots’ responses to the hazard,” the NTSB concluded. Boeing declines to comment about the aircraft certification provisions in the law, signed on 27 December by President Donald Trump. “The FAA is reviewing the certification language that was included in the funding bill and will work to implement the changes as directed by Congress,” the agency says.