British Airways is returning the Airbus A380 to its active fleet as part of its plans for a massive increase in capacity to the USA and elsewhere. This follows the recent announcement that fully vaccinated UK citizens will be able to travel to the USA from November. IAG-owned BA will initially operate its A380s on short-haul European connections in order to re-familiarise crew with the equipment, before rolling it out on routes to Los Angeles, Miami and Dubai in December. Additionally, BA will increase frequency between London and New York to five times daily in November, rising to eight times daily the following month. Double-daily services will also be operated to Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, Dallas, Miami and Toronto, and there will be daily services to Philadelphia, Phoenix, Seattle, Atlanta, Denver, Houston and Vancouver. Through October and November, BA will restart services to Austin, Orlando, Tampa, San Diego, Las Vegas and Baltimore, followed by Nashville and New Orleans in December, "which both proved to be a hit with customers when they first launched". In total the airline plans to fly to 23 US airports this winter, with up to 246 flights a week – more, it says, than any other transatlantic carrier. Flights to popular luxury Indian Ocean destinations the Maldives and Mauritius will increase to 10 and six per week, respectively, over Christmas. Caribbean services will be bolstered to Barbados, Antigua and St Lucia, from Heathrow and Gatwick airports. Within its short-haul offering there will be an extra 13,000 seats to "holiday hotspots". Destinations such as Marrakech and Dalaman will feature in flight schedules for the October half-term school break. For the winter season, BA will restart several ski destinations including Innsbruck, Grenoble and Salzburg from December. Combined, the step-up in capacity will give BA its most extensive network since March 2020. “This is an exciting time for British Airways and our customers as we see borders reopening. With welcome news from the US, we are dramatically increasing flights and bringing home some of our A380s to give our customers as many options as possible," states Neil Chernoff, the airline's director of network and alliances. "Elsewhere across our network, we are also adding additional services to destinations all over the world, to ensure our customers can take advantage of a much-needed holiday."

The president of Emirates Airline is warning the airline industry not to make carbon-reduction promises it cannot deliver.
“People are expecting us… by the end of this decade, to take out 40% of our emissions… We are in la-la-land if you think we are going to do this,” Tim Clark said on 4 October. He made his comments in Boston on the opening day of IATA’s 2021 World Air Transport Summit. Earlier the same day, at its annual general meeting, IATA adopted a resolution calling for the airline industry to achieve “net-zero carbon emissions by 2050”. “If you create the expectation we are going to have electric A380s flying… We have to do something about that,” Clark says, adding that the industry must “bring people back to reality”. Much discussion on the event’s first day involved carbon reduction. Executives at airframers and airlines pledged their support for carbon-cutting goals, saying the world is emerging from the pandemic with renewed dedication to cleaner power. But exactly how the industry intends to achieve such change remains largely unclear. Executives laid out several potential paths – and accompanying hurdles. “Sustainable aviation fuel – that will be a step-function change in the very near term,” says Boeing Commercial Airplanes chief executive Stan Deal. Airbus chief Guillaume Faury says: “We have planes… that are already certified for burning 50% sustainable aviation fuel.” SAF accounts for a sliver of the aviation industry’s current fuel burn. IATA has set out SAF goals calling for SAF to account for 5% of the industry’s total fuel usage by 2030. Emirates’ Clark raised skepticism that sustainable fuel prices can be made economically viable, noting that the fuel can cost two or three times that of traditional fossil-based aviation gas. IATA suspects that, as SAF production increases, the sector will achieve a “tipping point”, after which costs will start declining. “The next steps are to scale the use of SAF,” says Airbus’s Faury. “We have a challenge.” Some governments are on board. A bill now working through the US Congress would provide tax credits to sustainable fuel blenders. Boeing’s Deal says he also supports a “tax credit for consumption” of SAF. Airbus’s clean-energy strategy includes development of a hydrogen-powered airliner for service entry in the mid-2030s. The airframer revealed its hydrogen-aircraft concept last year. “There are many challenges with using hydrogen,” Faury says, citing “engineering work” and the need for a hydrogen supply chain.

KLM is “in the midst” of discussing a possible narrowbody aircraft order with Airbus and Boeing. That is according to KLM chief executive Pieter Elbers, who says the airline is returning to a fleet replacement process that had been under way when the Covid-19 pandemic struck. “We’re now in the midst of the discussions with the two of them,” Elbers says when asked about narrowbodies offered by Airbus and Boeing. “We are speaking here with the suppliers.” He made his comments on 4 October in Boston during IATA’s World Air Transport Summit. Elbers notes that KLM already renewed its regional-aircraft fleet with Embraer E-Jets and its widebody fleet with 787's and 777's. Now, KLM’s focus returns to replacing 737's. KLM and affiliate Transavia operate nearly 100 737NG's, which have an average age of 12 years, according to fleets data. Some are more than 20 years old. “The focus today is first getting the replacement of the 737s,” Elbers says. “We haven’t made any decision yet.” He declines to discuss the relative merits of narrowbodies offered by Boeing and Airbus. “I’ll let the process run,” Elbers says.