Thomas Cook has received "multiple bids" for its airlines since launching a strategic review of the business in February, it confirmed today in disclosing half-year results. The travel group says the offers variously span the whole of the airlines business or just parts of it. "As we assess these bids, we will consider all the options to enhance value to shareholders and intensify our strategic focus," it adds. The Group Airline unit's underlying operating profit worsened 20% in the six-month period ended 31 March, to £71 million, as revenue declined 8.1% to £1.02 billion.

Lawmakers grilled the head of the Federal Aviation Administration on the 15th of May, hammering acting administrator Dan Elwell with questions about the FAA’s certification and oversight of both Boeing and the troubled 737 Max. Elwell sat before a House Transportation Committee panel for hours, during which he expressed confidence in the FAA’s certification work. But he conceded pilots should have known more about the 737 Max’s manoeuvring characteristics augmentation system (MCAS), the flight control software implicated as a factor in two 737 Max crashes. “When I first heard of this, I thought that the MCAS should have been more adequately explained… in the manual,” Elwell tells lawmakers. “There should have been more text in the manual about MCAS.”
His comments hinged repeatedly on concepts like “safety-critical systems” and “single points” of failure.
Was the 737 Max’s MCAS safety critical, one lawmaker asked. “It seems to me that, yes, it is,” Elwell replied.
Why, then, did the FAA approve a system that can cause the aircraft to dive based on one faulty angle-of-attack (AOA) indicator? Elwell replied that pilots can counter MCAS by using a checklist they should have in memory.

IAG is to place four Airbus A321neos with its Spanish spin-off arm Iberia Express, deploying the twinjets with the carrier from April next year. Iberia Express already has four A321s , part of a fleet which also includes 18 A320s. It says the aircraft will be configured with 232 seats, in a mix of business- and economy-class cabins. They will undoubtedly help us to consolidate further the value proposition to our customers,” says chief executive Fernando Candela.
Airbus’s latest backlog figures show that Spanish flag-carrier Iberia converted a December 2015 order for three A320neos to A321neos in April this year. This conversion gives Iberia a total order of seven A321neos as well as 13 A320neos – two of which have been delivered.