Nigeria's aviation regulator has suspended Azman Air's Boeing 737 operations with immediate effect, in order to conduct a safety audit. The Nigerian civil aviation authority (NCAA) says in a 16 March statement that the suspension relates to "a series of incidents" involving Azman Air 737s. "The suspension is to enable the authority to conduct an audit of the airline to determine the root cause(s) of the incidents, and recommend corrective actions to forestall re-occurrence," says the NCAA, without specifying the incidents to which it refers. Privately owned Azman operates a fleet of four owned 737-500s and two 737-300s, data shows. It also owns an ex-Virgin Atlantic Airbus A340-600, acquired last year to launch long-haul services. Azman began operations in 2014 and serves a number of domestic routes from its Kanu base. "We are on our toes to restore operations within a short period," the airline has stated in a Twitter posting.

Bookings for American Airlines flights during the course of the last week in February and the first two weeks of March continuously climbed toward levels seen during the same period in 2019. The Fort Worth-based carrier's chief executive Doug Parker said during the virtual JP Morgan Industrials Conference on 15 March that American's bookings data has been recently improving at a faster rate than the increasing passenger throughput data disclosed by the US Transportation Security Administration. "Our last three weeks have been the best three weeks since the pandemic hit, and each week has been better than the prior one," Parker says. "We're really getting to a point where bookings are coming up very close to what we've seen in the past. The number last week was actually 20% lower than 2019." Parker is careful to distinguish the bookings data from total revenue, and also points out that in the absence of business travel American is still not flying half the amount of passengers it had flown during the same period in 2019. "Most of this is largely leisure based, lower yielding. We now get to start working on improving yields. We haven't been doing yield management at airlines for a while. We've just been pricing the product and leaving the buckets open and taking what we can." Parker additionally disclosed that American is for the first time since the pandemic began not attempting to raise capital. American during the first quarter increased its available liquidity to $17 billion when it upsized from $7.5 billion to $10 billion its latest round of debt capital raising, secured by its loyalty programme AAdvantage. "Not included in that [$17 billion] number is the [recently signed into law] American Rescue Plan, which adds in a little over $3 billion from payroll support, and around $400 million for pension relief," Parker says. "That's over $20 billion pro forma, and is what has us not spending one second of our time looking at raising money for hopefully quite some time. We're going to move to actually getting people flying again and working to begin de-levering and paying down debt."

Nok Air has been granted approval from Thailand's Central Bankruptcy Court for a one-month extension to submit its rehabilitation plan. "The Central Bankruptcy Court has considered and issued an order approving the extension of the submission period of the rehabilitation plan to 15 April," the airline said in a 15 March disclosure to the Stock Exchange of Thailand. The Thai low-cost airline stated that its rehabilitation planners had on 10 March applied for the extension from the previous deadline of 15 March, in accordance with Thailand's Bankruptcy Act. Nok Air says it needs the extension due to "several important aspects which required the all-aspect analysis, consideration and formulation of the debt structure, capital structure, and organisational structure". It states: "This is in addition to legal issues and contractual obligations with employees, business partners, and debtors; as well as in conjunction with financial estimates, capacity for debt repayment and future business plans. "The production of the rehabilitation plan is therefore highly important, requires consideration [and] detailed analysis to result in a just outcome for all creditors, and discussion with creditors and all interested parties in the draft rehabilitation plan in accordance with various principles to [ensure] the rehabilitation plan will receive the approval of the creditors’ meeting." Once the plan has been submitted, the official receiver is due to hold a creditors' meeting to consider the rehabilitation plan. The Central Bankruptcy Court, if satisfied with the plan, will issue an order approving the plan and appointing plan administrators, with Nok Air to proceed to implement the rehabilitation plan and provide updates on the rehabilitation progress. Under Section 90/43 of Thailand's Bankruptcy Act, the court may grant an extension on "not more than two occasions and for a period not exceeding one month for each occasion", according to an unofficial translation of the act by Thailand's Office of the Council of State. Compatriot airline Thai Airways International, which is also undergoing business rehabilitation and has already submitted its plan to the court, availed itself of both one-month extensions. It extended its submission deadline from January to February, then February to March. Last year, the Central Bankruptcy Court accepted Nok's application for business rehabilitation on 30 July. It then approved Nok for the process on 4 November, appointing the airline's chief executive Wutthiphum Jurangkool – plus four other individuals, and Grant Thornton Special Advisory Services – to prepare the restructuring plan. They were given a three-month deadline from 15 December to submit the plan by 15 March.