Air Canada has drawn up climate targets to realise a goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions throughout its global operations by 2050. The flag carrier has set absolute mid-term greenhouse gas emissions net reduction targets by 2030 in its air and ground operations versus its 2019 baseline and has committed to investing C$50 million ($40 million) in sustainable aviation fuel and other low carbon aviation fuel development to boost its work on sustainable aviation fuels. Moreover, Air Canada will continue to deploy its newly-modernised and energy-efficient Airbus A220 and Boeing 737 Max narrowbody fleets that are expected to average approximately 20% less fuel consumption per seat and emit approximately 20% less CO2 and 50% less nitrogen oxides than aircraft they replace. The airline says it will also further evaluate the viability, safety and performance of new electric, hydrogen or hybrid operational technologies and other innovations such as short-haul transportation opportunities and electric drones to complement and support Air Canada's global business network. Air Canada will also explore carbon negative emission technologies and other direct emission reduction and removal strategies in addition to further developing its carbon offset strategy for the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation compliance and customer offerings.

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."