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Just as Ireland’s own Aer Lingus is bracing for a pilots' strike, or what they call industrial action, it also gets some good news: Aer Lingus just became the first European carrier to win blanket approval for EC/US flights next March under a US Transportation Department action. The Irish carrier can basically do what it wants and start advertising and taking reservations. After the open skies pact between the United States and the European Community was inked for a March 2008 opening, the US authorities invited such applications, and they have poured in from giants such as British Airways, Lufthansa and others. Aer Lingus, which broke away from the oneworld alliance and will be on its own, already plans to increase service to the Washington area via Dulles and also plans to add San Francisco International and Orlando with its new Airbus A330s as they come into the fleet. Aer Lingus is the first European carrier to get the blanket okay, and Delta was the first US-flag flyer to win the broad authority.

When an airline announces just one or two flights a day to an airport, one sometimes wonders why it’s bothering to make the news. So when American said that its Eagle affiliate will start turboprop service in and out of Miami late this year on two routes, one with just a single daily flight, one did wonder: the ATR-72 turboprop flights go just once daily to and from Savannah, Georgia, and twice a day, morning and evening to and from Sarasota/Bradenton, Florida, and that doesn’t make that much sense until you look at the schedule: to Savannah, the flight leaves at 8 o’clock at night - a good time for business flyers connecting from American’s huge Latin hub at Miami, an operation that already dominates the air-traffic and air-travel flow southwards from all over the States.

In the September issue of Airline Business I have tried to explain what actually is being investigated around the globe when it comes to price-fixing.

This is what I wrote in the magazine late last year on the subject.

And, simply because it makes for fascinating reading, below find the full list of contacts between British Airways and Virgin Atlantic (as provided by BA) detailing exactly who talked to whom and about what in their price-fixing case.

They say cheats never prosper, so the hefty fines being meted out today to British Airways over its role in colluding with Virgin Atlantic over long haul fuel surcharges seem suitably just.

BA received a severe £121.5 million ($243 million) rap this morning from the UK's Office of Fair Trading and it seems likely to take another multi-million hit later today when the US Department of Justice dishes out its part of the fine. BA put aside £350 million in anticipation of the fines a few weeks ago which is apparently enough to cover both these fines and any civil litigation that may follow.

Ryanair – the full story of the controversial low-cost airline dishes the dirt on the airline that charges wheelchair users to rent a chair, opposes carbon trading for airlines and features everyone from the Pope to Saddam Hussein in its advertising.

While the UK is under constant rainfall it is worth remembering that it is sunny somewhere in this world:

As mentioned on AirSpace(our new community platform) I think i would prefer to be in the rain though than be the pilot trying to get back into that aircraft.

They say honesty is the best policy, and you have to admire the Midwest Airlines employee who stumbled on a bag of gems near the Kansas City airport, a haul worth about a cool quarter million dollars. Midwest ramp agent Robert Lewis says he thought for a second about keeping it, since it was lying out at a road intersection near the employee parking lot. Lewis may be getting a reward from the jeweller whose name was on the bag holding the gems,
but one wonders if they are all that happy at Midwest headquarters up in Milwaukee.

After all, Midwest needs every penny it can get. Just the other day, the airline said its earnings would be down for the rest of the year, and that it couldn't say how far down. That's hardly a good thing to have to say when you're trying to fend off a hostile take-over. Midwest has been battling off a siege by AirTran Airways for months now, and the castle is hardly safe.

On the one hand Europe's airlines - network, leisure, low-cost and regional - say they are in favour of emissions trading as a way to curb emissions.

On the other hand, when their consultants took a deeper look at how the European Commission was going to include aviation in its wider Emissions Trading Scheme the result was not good (here is the full report). "Costly and unworkable" went the press release. "Underestimates the wide-ranging reprecussions of the proposal on European aviation," they continued.

Over the years we have got use to images of aircraft manufacturing CEOs posing proudly beside models of their latest creations. Remember Boeing head Alan Mulally and his Sonic Cruiser a few years ago?

So it is with some surprise that the latest such image features not a Mulally type, but an airline CEO type: the CEO in question is easyJet boss Andrew Harrison.

Here he is posing in front of the "easyJet ecoJet", an aircraft concept he unveiled today (14 June) in London that he wants to deliver huge environmental benefits.

Consumers and producers like labels. They can tell you useful things about a product like what substances are in a food or how much power an electrical device uses.

UK regional carrier flybe has just brought the idea to the airline business with an eco-labelling scheme. It is the brainchild of Mike Rutter, the airline's chief commercial officer, who had seen a labelling scheme work well for previous employer Hoover, a maker of household appliances.

Prominently flagged on flybe's website, the labelling gives passengers a detailed breakdown of the fuel consumption, carbon emissions and noise patterns of the aircraft type used on their journey when they make a booking.