Tata Group is most likely to win the bid for Indian flag carrier Air India, a former Air India executive has said. "It's my take that the Tata would eventually emerge as the successfully bidders considering… they are in the business and used to own Air India in the past," said former Air India executive director Jitender Bhargava during a 29 September Bloomberg TV interview. "They have the wherewithal to inject a large sum of money into Air India to revive it. The other factor that we shouldn't be overlooking is that Tata have been very, very passionate about Air India." He said the passion stemmed from the fact that Tata Group originally founded Air India in 1932. Local Indian media, including the Business Standard, in a 29 September report that cited anonymous sources, said the government has started evaluating financial bids received from Tata Group and SpiceJet founder Ajay Singh. A 29 September Economic Times report stated, according to anonymous sources, that the government would be in a position to announce the winning bidder by mid-October. A source has not independently verified either of those local media reports. "This investment process was launched almost one-and-a-half years ago and the financial bids were submitted on 15 September," Bhargava said. "The government has not made it public how many people have submitted bids, but it's generally believed that... Tata have bid and so has the promoter of SpiceJet in its individual capacity." He went on to say that should Tata emerge as the winner, it would be unlikely to "wager to change" the name of Air India. "I've often stated it: it may never have been as good an airline as it ought to have been, but it's also not as bad an airline as it is made out to be, because of the government ownership," he said.

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."