First Air and Canadian North, as previously reported, are merging. The Canadian North name will survive, but the red and white First Air livery will become the livery for the merged airline. Aircraft are now being painted with the new titles.The two carriers have announced a unified passenger and cargo schedule is now available for booking and will take effect on Friday, November 1, 2019. Together, the merged airline will provide safe, friendly and reliable service to 24 northern communities, from our southern gateways of Ottawa, Montreal and Edmonton, with seamless interline connections to destinations throughout Canada, the United States and beyond.

Source: World Airline News

Start-up regional operator Great Dane Airlines is expanding its fledgling network from Aalborg into its Scandinavian neighbourhood. It is planning to open services to the Swedish capital Stockholm, serving Arlanda airport, as well as the city of Gothenburg. Although flights will commence on 14 November, the services will be relatively infrequent, just once every two weeks. Great Dane says the departures to Stockholm will take place in "odd weeks" and Gothenburg in "even weeks". While there are no air services connecting Aalborg to either Swedish city, both are served multiple times daily from Copenhagen. Aalborg is geographically closer to Gothenburg than to Copenhagen, but Great Dane would be competing with frequent ferry services to Gothenburg out of the Danish port of Frederikshavn. Great Dane uses a small fleet of Embraer 195s. It commenced services in June this year and operates scheduled flights to Nice, Dublin and Edinburgh.

Source: FlightGlobal

Preliminary information from Colombian investigators indicate that an ATR 72-600 suddenly sank in the moments before touchdown, leading to hard landing and tail-strike. The Regional Express Airlines aircraft (HK-5041) suffered structural damage during the accident, which occurred on 7 September as it landed at Manizales in central Colombia. It had been arriving from Bogota as flight AV4852, operating on behalf of Avianca. French investigation authority BEA, citing its Colombian counterpart, says the aircraft experienced a "sudden sink" over the threshold of runway 10. Meteorological data for the city's La Nubia airport at time of the accident, around 11:00, show no adverse weather conditions, but indicate a tailwind. Video images circulated on social media, purporting to show the tail-strike from surveillance cameras, suggest the impact occurred about 100m from the threshold, almost immediately after the aircraft pitched nose-up in the flare. None of the 49 passengers and five crew members was seriously injured.

Source: FlighGlobal