Skift Airline Weekly

Air Canada, in its boldest strategic move yet, strikes a deal to buy Air Transat India just lost an airline. Brazil just lost an airline. Europe is losing airlines. Hong Kong is set to lose one of its airlines through consolidation. Now, it’s Canada’s turn. Early last week, WestJet stunned the market by announcing a […]

The Skift Airline Weekly Lounge returns with an exclusive interview with British Airways CEO Alex Cruz. Since taking over as CEO and chairman of British Airways in 2016, Cruz has endured his fair share of criticism over some of the changes he made to the airline, particularly with regards to food on short-haul flights. But Cruz, […]

AirAsia is indisputably one of the world’s most successful airlines ever—don’t let its notoriously complex accounting obscure that reality. But the company is now trying to be something much more than an airline. Less than three months after the 9/11 terror attacks upended the global airline business, a music executive named Tony Fernandes bought a […]

Was it a good first quarter for U.S. airlines? In the aggregate: not bad. The country’s nine largest publicly-traded carriers collectively earned almost $3b in operating profits, along with a solid 7% operating margin—once upon a time it was rare to see any black ink in the offpeak first quarter. The 7% figure, furthermore, was […]

Sir Richard Branson knows how to make money. He’s a billionaire, after all. But his airlines? They’re better known not for making money but losing it. Remember Virgin Express, Virgin Sun, Virgin Nige-ria, Little Red, and Virgin America? None survives today. Virgin Australia is still around, but it’s notable for how much worse it’s performing […]

Once upon a time, it was the predator, not the prey. In India’s first wave of airline deregulation in the early 1990s, Jet Airways was a promising upstart, bringing world-class levels of service to a market long cursed with the legendary shortcomings of Air India. By the mid-2000s, Jet was standing tall, emerging as the […]

The first hint came as early as 2011. JetBlue had just placed an order for A320-NEOs. And responding to an analyst question about potentially flying to longer-haul international markets like Europe, the carrier’s then-chief commercial officer didn’t deny the possibility: “Certainly with the winglets and then later the NEO, then some of those markets that […]

JetBlue will begin flying from New York City and Boston, MA to London in 2021. Here is a quick review of the pluses and minuses. We’ll have a closer look in Monday’s new issue. The Opportunities JetBlue is flying transatlantically in about the lowest-risk way possible: without buying expensive new widebodies. It will use narrowbody […]

From 2000 to 2008, it was a fragmented mess. From 2008 onward, it consolidated. Is the U.S. airline industry on the verge of disruptive fragmentation once again? Last week brought news of another new U.S. airline startup, first reported by NPR’s Hear & Now. The startup is the brainchild of Andrew Levy, United Airlines’ former […]

An outbreak of airlines in critical condition, and other major developments from an eventful first quarter: It was an eventful first quarter, with good news, bad news, and even tragic news for the world’s airlines. The tragedy, of course, was the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 last month, which killed 157 people and raising […]