Air Europa Maintenance has acquired US Federal Aviation Administration repair station certification for its bases in Madrid and Barcelona. The Spanish airline's maintenance division says the approval enables it to complete transit and weekly maintenance checks and repairs on Boeing 787-8/9's and Airbus A330-200/300's operating under FAA regulation. The FAA certification was achieved by complying with a process overseen by Spanish regulator AESA under a bilateral agreement between the USA and EU, the MRO provider notes. Air Europa says it does not rule out "to expand the scope of the service offered according to the needs that customers may present".

The US Federal Aviation Administration has received from NASA new airport operations software designed to improve the fuel and emissions efficiency of commercial aircraft taxiing and take-offs and reduce taxi delays. NASA has additionally given the FAA the findings from its six-year "Airspace Technology Demonstration 2" (ATD-2) project during which it tested the "integrated arrival, departure and surface" (IADS) suite of airport operations tools at Charlotte-Douglas, Dallas/Fort Worth and Dallas Love Field airports. The FAA will initially deploy the new surface management technology at 27 hub airports in the USA. The agency estimates that the software will enable airports and carriers to save more than 7 million gallons of fuel and eliminate more than 75,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year. "The software calculates when it's best to have the airplane push back from the gate at busy hub airports so that the airplanes can roll right to the runway," FAA administrator Steve Dickson said during a media briefing on 28 September. "With this capability we can reduce taxi delays and ramp congestion. And after take-off the system enables air traffic controllers to merge your flight right into the stream of jet traffic." Dickson explains that while the FAA and air traffic controllers had access to airlines' flight schedules, they never knew precisely when an aircraft might be departing "until they hit the spot on the ramp and talk to air traffic control". "Now we'll have advanced visibility into the metrics that the airline has so that we can be much more specific about predicting an on-time departure. And that just allows us to manage the rest of the system much more effectively and remove those bottlenecks on the ground." NASA administrator Bill Nelson says the IADS software is rooted in the agency's technology used to calculate trajectories for space travel. "The idea behind this was simple: take that technology and apply it to a commercial aircraft when they are pushing back from the gate, taxiing to the runway, taking off and reaching cruising altitude without stopping. We had already done this with the FAA years ago on descent technology." NASA's previously developed ground-based and flight deck tools used throughout the arrival phase of a flight are in the final stages of implementation by the FAA and US aviation. Nelson notes that NASA's partnership with commercial aviation is continuing with its development of both an electric and a supersonic aircraft intended to fly over populated areas. "This is a needle-nosed creature coming out of the skunkworks that will be able to fly supersonic over populated areas because we are lowering the sound of the sonic boom."

Nok Air has received approval from Thailand's Central Bankruptcy Court for its rehabilitation plan at a 29 September hearing, clearing the final hurdle to implement the plan. "After consideration of the rehabilitation plan, its amendment, objections against the plan and planners’ clarification, including the official receiver’s opinion on several issues, the Central Bankruptcy Court issued an order to approve the plan and its amendment," the airline says in a same-day filing to the Stock Exchange of Thailand. The court also appointed the four plan administrators named in the rehabilitation plan, who are authorised to operate the business, manage company assets and implement the plan. They include chief executive Wutthiphum Jurangkool, directors Tai Chong Yih and Chavalit Uttasart and independent director Prinya Waiwatana. Nok Air says it is confident that the plan administrators will “successfully” implement the plan soon. The court accepted Nok's application for business rehabilitation on 30 July 2020, and approved it for the process on 4 November 2020, appointing planners to prepare the rehabilitation plan. Nok Air's creditors accepted its rehabilitation plan at a 4 August meeting.