The Oneworld alliance is getting a new full-fledged member in the South Pacific. Within the next year, Fiji Airways will become a full member of the global alliance, Oneworld leaders announced Monday.
18.05.2024 - 13:19 / thepointsguy.com / Joe Biden
President Joe Biden signed the 2024 FAA Reauthorization Act into law on Thursday. The law provides funding for the Federal Aviation Administration for the next five years and addresses various aspects of air travel related to consumer protections, investments in air traffic control staffing and much more.
Notably, the act also expands funds for another agency: the National Transportation Safety Board. This is the independent federal body tasked with investigating major accidents involving all forms of transportation and making recommendations based on the findings.
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The legislation allocates $738 million to the NTSB through fiscal year 2028, along with the $105 billion in funding for the FAA.
Beyond funding, however, the reauthorization act implements numerous reforms and practices that the NTSB has pushed for, in some cases for years. While the NTSB has the authority to investigate incidents, the recommendations it issues are not binding.
Most prominently, the act requires airlines to outfit all new and existing aircraft with cockpit voice recorders that can save 25 hours of audio before overwriting existing recordings. Airlines are currently required to carry CVRs that record just two hours of audio.
In theory, the two-hour requirement was meant to ensure that the final events leading up to an accident were recorded and preserved for investigators.
In practice, however, when an accident occurs but the pilots are able to land safely, the time it takes to land and fully shut the plane down — thus deactivating the recorder — has meant that the relevant recordings are often gone by the time investigators begin to examine the plane. Recordings from 14 incidents that the NTSB has investigated since 2018 were missing because they had been overwritten, the agency said.
The NTSB first recommended that the FAA extend the minimum recording time in 2017; this came after a close call in which Air Canada flight 759 was within just a few seconds of inadvertently landing on a taxiway at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) rather than the runway. Four other aircraft were on the taxiway at the time and would have been in the path of the Air Canada flight. By the time the episode was reported and an investigation was launched, the CVR had been overwritten.
Related: Boeing safety culture in the spotlight at dual Senate hearings amid whistleblower report
The legislation also enacts several other NTSB recommendations. One such rule would require planes that fly over oceans to have equipment that can broadcast CVR and flight data recorder data remotely in the event of an accident and broadcast the location of the wreckage. That
The Oneworld alliance is getting a new full-fledged member in the South Pacific. Within the next year, Fiji Airways will become a full member of the global alliance, Oneworld leaders announced Monday.
A Virgin Australia flight had to turn around after a man is said to have run naked through the cabin, The Guardian reported.
It’s already shaping up to be a busy summer travel season in the United States. On the Friday before Memorial Day, the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screened 2.95 million airline passengers, the highest number ever recorded in a single day. And Airlines for America, a trade group representing major U.S. airlines, has estimated a 6.3 percent increase in fliers this summer over the last. While airports are certainly going to be more crowded, one carrier is trying to make the in-flight experience a little roomier for some lucky fliers.
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Finnair Plus' loyalty program has adopted Avios as its loyalty currency, and you can now transfer Avios between Finnair Plus and British Airways Executive Club, opening up all sorts of new earning and redemption opportunities.
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Excitement is building as the countdown begins for the inaugural Skift Data + AI Summit on June 4 in New York City. We’re thrilled to announce five remarkable individuals who will join us on stage with their expertise and insights, enriching the discourse on the intersection of data, artificial intelligence, and the travel industry.