A number of new flights to Europe, Africa and Asia lead this week’s top air travel news. 

This week Delta and its partners, KLM, Virgin Atlantic and Korean Air, launched a number of flights from Boston’s Logan International Airport. On March 31, KLM began operating a route to Amsterdam, adding to Delta’s existing twice-daily service; on April 1, Virgin Atlantic launched daytime service from Boston to London – Heathrow, bringing service on that route to three times daily between the two airlines. Officials said that the new morning departure would enable better in-flight workday productivity for London-bound business travelers. 

Looking ahead, on April 12 Korean Air will start new, nonstop service between Boston and Seoul, one of the first additions to the Korean Air – Delta joint venture’s transpacific network since the partnership was launched last May. Later this spring, Delta will begin seasonal service out of Boston to Lisbon and Edinburgh. 

In 2020, Delta and Virgin Atlantic will also begin flying to London – Gatwick from Boston, as well as from New York – JFK, bringing the two airlines to 18 flights daily to the UK from the two cities. Full Gatwick schedule details will be announced later this year. 

In other Europe flight news, this week Air France launched its new service between Dallas – Fort Worth and Paris – Charles de Gaulle, which will operate up to five times weekly throughout the summer on Airbus A330 aircraft. Dallas is the airline’s 13th destination in the United States. 

On the West Coast, this week Air Italy inaugurated its new nonstop service between Los Angeles and Milan, marking the third destination in North America served by the airline. On April 10, the airline will also launch a new service to Milan from San Francisco. 

The new Milan – Los Angeles flight also marked the launch of Air Italy’s new Business Class product. Business Class now includes a new dine-on-demand service that allows passengers to choose from an a la carte menu at any time. The new product is set to roll out across the airline’s network in the coming weeks. 

In other new flight news, South African Airways increased its frequency on nonstop flights between Washington – Dulles and Accra, Ghana, this week. The service now operates five times weekly, on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday. The route also offers continuing service to Johannesburg, South Africa. 

Finally, in other onboard product news, this week marked the launch of American Airlines’ new A321neo aircraft, which made its debut on a flight between Phoenix and Orlando. The new planes offer customers power at every seat, free wireless entertainment and live TV streamed to guest devices, high-speed Wi-Fi from gate to gate and built-in seatback holders for tablets and phones. The planes have a capacity of 196 seats — 129 in the Main Cabin, 47 extra-legroom Main Cabin Extra seats and 20 first class seats — as well as a number of features that improve fuel efficiency. American has ordered a total of 100 A321neos and plans to continue flying the aircraft on additional routes through the rest of the year. 

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Even in turmoil, India’s aviation industry has been adding new capacity faster than the growth in air passenger traffic.

Domestic passengers flown every month by Indian airlines has grown in double digits for four-and-a-half years till February, according to the Montreal-based International Air Transport Association (IATA).

Despite this growth, the industry’s passenger load factor (PLF), a measure of capacity utilisation, has been falling recently as carriers expanded their fleet. In fact, from October 2018 to February this year, Indian aviation’s PLF has declined on a year-on-year basis, according to the latest IATA figures. 

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A high load factor means fewer seats on flights are being left empty. This is crucial for a price-sensitive industry, which has thin profit margins in India, even as PLF here is the highest among major aviation markets, including the US, China, and Brazil.

But since November, the Indian airlines’ PLF has declined the fastest. This is due to a greater rise in capacity than air traffic, said Ashish Nainan, aviation analyst at CARE Ratings, even at a time when many of the Indian carriers are either stuck in or emerging from the red.

Deliveries have begun rolling in on the massive orders that carriers such as IndiGo, Air Vistara, and SpiceJet had placed with aircraft makers. The airlines have also been increasing the number of their flight routes and frequencies amid a push by the Indian government to expand regional air connectivity.

Meanwhile, though still in double digits, the rate of growth in passenger traffic has fallen 5% since October as government policies have forced airlines to raise their fares, leading to a drop in the load factor, said Mark Martin, founder and CEO of Martin Consulting.

“After GST, the government has increased airport charges. Then there’s been an 18-20% rise in service charges, from catering to fuelling services,” he said. “The costs have gone up, so the fares will also go up.”

Flight cancellations by Jet Airways, which is reeling under a debt of over $1 billion, will most likely be reflected in the data for March, as will the Indian aviation regulator’s grounding of SpiceJet’s 13 Boeing 737 Max planes following the Ethiopian Airlines crash, Nainan said. 

These events, having hit capacity addition, may just have ended the decline in India aviation’s load factor without refurbishing the passenger growth rate.

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According to the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation (CAPA), aircraft leasing accounts for half the world’s commercial aircraft. Commercial aircraft aren’t cheap, which explains why so many airlines prefer to lease rather than buy. As air travel continues to grow, aircraft leasing also should increase.

CAPA’s fleet database suggests that aircraft leasing is higher in Latin America, Europe and Asia, and lower in North America and Africa. Of the aircraft leased by lessors, most prefer regional jets and narrowbodies; widebodies are less favorable.

Ireland-based AerCap (AER, $47.92) is the world’s largest owner of commercial aircraft with 1,421 aircraft owned, managed or on order.

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Over the past five years, AerCap purchased leased or sold more than 2,000 aircraft. Its average remaining lease term on its planes is almost seven-and-a-half years, providing investors with cash flow certainty.

AerCap is good at turning a profit – it has done so for each of the past 12 years. AerCap did see revenues shrink 4.7% year-over-year in 2018, to $4.8 billion, but it managed to keep its earnings flat at $1.02 billion. And because the company prefers stock buybacks over paying a dividend, its earnings per share grew by 6.2% to $6.83.

The company will feel the “Boeing effect,” even if just to a small extent. The company presently has only five Boeing 737 Max 8s in its fleet, but it’s supposed to take delivery of 17 in 2019, 24 in 2020 and 58 beyond that, representing approximately 30% of its aircraft on order. The coming year could require some changes to its order book to account for expected delays. Long-term, however, this should not be a material concern. Investors don’t seem worried: AER shares have rallied 21% in 2019.

SEE ALSO: The 10 Best (And 10 Worst) Stocks of This 10-Year Bull Market

What does discount carrier Allegiant Air know about the resort industry?

The short answer is that it knows enough to spend close to $500 million to build a new resort on Florida’s gulf coast.

With ground broken last month on the 22-acre property, the first for Allegiant’s new Sunseeker Resorts brand, the complex in Punta Gorda, Fla., is expected to be done in early 2021.

“People don’t understand the Allegiant business model,” said Micah Richins, executive vice president and COO for Sunseeker Resorts, and a former longtime MGM Resorts International employee. “The name of the company is actually Allegiant Travel Co., which would connote more than being just an airline.”

Sunseeker Resorts

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Last year, Las Vegas-based Allegiant hired Richins and Jason Shkorupa, another former MGM hospitality pro, to oversee the Sunseeker project. Allegiant President John Redmond, himself a former MGM executive, and chairman and CEO Maurice Gallagher wanted to find a way to take advantage of the large number of passengers the airline flies in and out of the Punta Gorda Airport and other nearby Florida airports.

“People ask why in the world we’d want to fly into Punta Gorda,” Richins said. “When you look up and down the southwest (Florida) coast, you have Tampa, St. Petersburg and Sarasota and then, from the south, you’ve got Naples, Marco Island and Fort Myers. In the middle of that, you have Charlotte County, and there hasn’t been a lot of development there.”

Plans are for the first phase of construction, on seven acres, to include 500 hotel rooms, a nearly 40,000-square-foot convention center space and a variety of restaurants, bars and retail stores. Allegiant also recently purchased the nearby 18-hole Kingsway Country Club golf course.

Richins and Shkorupa plan to relocate later this year to Florida to oversee the project from ground zero.

“Allegiant takes a million to a million-and-a-half people into Punta Gorda every year,” Richins said. “This is an opportunity for us to leverage that database.”

Allegiant flies about 8 million people in and out of Florida annually. The presence of the new resort, the company said, would likely attract an additional 300,000 visitors to Charlotte County each year.

To make room for the resort, Allegiant spent about $50 million to purchase nearly two dozen parcels of land. That’s in addition to the approximately $420 million it will take to erect the resort.

“There’s been a ton of work that’s already been done,” Shkorupa said. “To get the land cleared, roadwork, utilities, working with the Army Corps of Engineers because we’re building on an estuary, there’s been so much that’s already been done. It’s been two years in the making to this point.”

Allegiant is expected to eventually hire close to 800 permanent employees for Sunseeker Resorts Charlotte Harbor, which will be the official name for the complex.

If all goes according to the company’s plan, more such resorts could follow.

“If we prove that we’re able to leverage the database in Punta Gorda, it would make sense that there’d be other opportunities for us to do similar things in other destinations,” Richins said. “We feel like we’re going to create the bar in Punta Gorda, because there’s just not a lot of competition there. People ask if we’d do something like this in Las Vegas and the answer, while you never say never, is probably not, because there’s so much competition here.”

As their pending relocation shows, Richins and Shkorupa aren’t supervising from a distance. The pair have been spending many days in a $1 million makeshift hotel lab that’s gone up in one of the buildings at Allegiant’s Summerlin headquarters.

Everything — from hallway carpet design pattern decisions to the fit of the kitchen cupboards in the makeshift suite units — has been labored over.

“There’s nothing on that coast that’s going to be remotely like this from a quality perspective,” Shkorupa said. “Micah and I spent 26 years with MGM Resorts watching what’s morphed in Las Vegas. We’re not trying to compete with Vegas — we’re not building a casino — but we’re going to be the newest product in our competitive set in this area of Florida.”

Richins and Shkorupa said they’re grateful the company’s leadership allowed the Sunseeker lab to go up.

“People think that we have a bunch of airline people building hotels now,” Richins said. “Nothing could be further from the truth. We have spectacular airline people who run the airline — if you’re an investor, the trajectory is going exactly how you would want it — but (Allegiant) has brought in hoteliers, food and beverage people, and operators to augment the Sunseeker team. We’ve been building this team.”

To Richins’ point, Allegiant Travel Co. finished the day Wednesday trading at just over $134 per share on the Nasdaq stock exchange. At the end of 2018, the stock traded for just over $100.

In a statement sent out last month on the Sunseeker groundbreaking, Redmond said it’s all part of Allegiant’s evolution as a company.

“Sunseeker Resorts Charlotte Harbor will be nothing short of extraordinary,” Redmond said. “It marks the launch of an unprecedented pairing — a world class hospitality brand with an airline at its head — which will bring synergies to our customers and spark innovation in truly transformative ways.”

If only it were an April Fools’ joke: On Monday, hundreds of flights were delayed after a brief software glitch affected U.S. airlines Delta, Southwest, United, American, Alaska, and JetBlue. The issue was due to a third-party, non-FAA system called AeroData, which some airlines use to determine the plane’s weight and balance data, which is necessary for takeoff.

“Much like any software that any company would use, you would hope that your provider has developed adequate backup processes so that if the primary system fails, a backup system kicks in almost instantaneously,” says Henry Harteveldt, travel industry analyst and the president of Atmosphere Research Group. “Clearly, that didn’t happen.”

After implementing an internal ground stop for 40 minutes on Monday morning, Southwest said it was anticipating “scattered flight delays” and that customers should check with the airline for the latest updates. Delta, meanwhile, cited a “brief third-party technology issue” that affected some Delta Connection flights and said it was working to “resolve some resulting delays.” United, which had “about 150” delays, advised travelers check the website for the most up-to-date information. American, Alaska, and JetBlue have all said they are working with customers.

If “technology problems cause headaches for fliers” sounds familiar, it is: Last week, travelers on JetBlue, American, and Alaska flights were stuck in long lines after Sabre, an airline reservations company, went down for 30 minutes.

Despite the length of this outage (relatively short) and the number of delays (relatively small), the AeroData outage has brought to light some of the unknowns of air travel, including a pilot’s pre-launch plan and keeping track of where—and how much—luggage is placed. (Entering incorrect baggage weights, as seen in the case of Southwest, is dangerous.) It’s also shown, once again, just how dependent airlines are these entrusted systems to do some of their most important work.

So where does AeroData fit into takeoff—and what power does the FAA have? Harteveldt says in this case, it helps to think of the FAA as a traffic cop. “They don’t directly employ AeroData,” he says. “AeroData works directly with the airlines. But the airlines have to file their flight plans with the FAA, and weight and balance data is a component of that flight plan.” In other words: If you’re an airline that uses AeroData to crunch your weight and balance information and that system is suddenly no longer available to you, you won’t get clearance to fly, because you can’t provide that required information. (This also explains why airlines that don’t use AeroData had no issues; other weight-and-balance technology systems include Evinta, LodeStar, and Jeppesen.)

AeroData, for its part, has no social media presence, a bare-bones website, and an address in Scottsdale, Arizona. (AeroData has not returned phone calls seeking comment.) Yet the available intel shows just how critical it is to flight operations: A 2017 consumer case study of the company says AeroData’s “flight deck client-server application is the last application used by pilots before the aircraft entry door is closed prior to takeoff,” presciently noting that “just five minutes of system downtime can result in over 100 delayed flights and loss of revenue.” More than 50 percent of all North American flights depend on AeroData, and the company says it’s “soon to be 85 percent.”

A plane’s correct weight and balance are essential to safe flight, and have been required for decades. “This is not new,” says Harteveldt. “One of the first things you learn when you’re starting to fly is the importance of weight and balance and how you calculate it on the little planes that you learn on as a student pilot. So it’s fundamental.”

Chalk it up to physics: Both weight and balance can dramatically affect takeoff speed, cruising speeds, and maneuverability while flying. Based on a plane’s design, the FAA assigns a “maximum allowable weight” for commercial aircraft. Still, a plane’s operational weight may be lower than its maximum, due to factors like high-density altitudes or shorter runways, both of which are considerations figuring into how much weight a plane can carry. (Think of it sort of like a much higher-stakes trip to the grocery store: Just because you can carry up to 100 pounds of fruit without hurting yourself, you may not do it every time, because the weather could be nasty or you might have to walk farther than normal.) There are also important pre-flight considerations: when every seat is occupied and the fuel tanks and baggage compartments are full, the airline is “grossly overloaded,” according to the FAA’s comprehensive “Weight Balance Handbook”. This means something has to give: either the pilot leaves baggage or passengers behind in order to reach the plane’s maximum flying range, or they’ll have to sacrifice range and find a way to take a shorter route. If this all sounds complicated, it is—which is why figuring out if a plane’s weight and balance are safe is largely left up to technology.

For now, the FAA has said it’s looking into the cause of the outage. But in situations like these, where flights are delayed because of technology glitches, do travelers have any recourse? The short answer: not really.

“A passenger on a U.S.-based airline has fewer rights than one flying on a European-based airline,” says air travel expert and airfarewatchdog.com founder George Hobica. “In the U.S., passengers only have the right to get a fare refund if a flight is canceled or severely delayed; to received compensation if bumped from a flight; and to be compensated for lost or delayed baggage. That’s about it.” As we’ve previously reported, passengers flying on a European-based airline have more protections; if the outage had affected one of these airlines, passengers would probably have a case, says Hobica.

It’s true that each of the aforementioned activities significantly damage the environment and threaten the future health of the planet. It’s also true that a single flight across the country generates approximately 20 percent of the greenhouse gases that a car emits over the span of a year. This latter activity, though, gets left off the list of human actions targeted in the Green New Deal.

Ukrainian Infrastructure Minister Volodymyr Omelyan opposes holding talks with Russia on the resumption of air travel between the two countries until Crimea and eastern parts of Ukraine are returned to the structure of Ukraine, he has told Interfax-Ukraine.

“After the return of the occupied Crimea and eastern areas of Ukraine, the payment of reparations for almost 400 years of occupation, we will definitely return to negotiations with Russia, Tatarstan, Chechnya and Siberia on the issue of flying over their territories and allowing the aviation companies of these countries to fly over the territory of Ukraine,” the minister said.

As reported, in response to the Ukrainian authorities’ prohibition of direct charter air travel between Ukraine and Russia approved on April 3, Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency (Rosaviatsia) proposed that negotiations be conducted and air travel be resumed on a regular and charter basis between Russia and Ukraine in full.

SOUTH BURLINGTON, Vt. – Do you know why the Transportation Safety Administration makes you take your shoes off at security and remove your laptop from its carrying case?

The agency explained those and other safety protocols at Burlington International Airport on Tuesday as it prepares for the heavy spring-break travel season.