Canada’s major airlines are undergoing a grilling in Ottawa today, and the head of Sunwing said his company could’ve done a better job handling holiday travel chaos. Summoned to a House of Commons committee that wants answers to questions about the holiday travel chaos that left many Canadians stranded overseas, Sunwing president Len Corrado was asked about cancellations that left hundreds of Canadians stranded in Mexico. He also was questioned about why Sunwing cancelled all flights to Saskatchewan over Christmas. Corrado apologized for the way the situation was handled. “The bottom line is, we know we could have done better,” Read more
flight delays
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration says normal U.S. air traffic operations are gradually resuming. “Normal air traffic operations are resuming gradually across the U.S. following an overnight outage to the Notice to Air Missions system that provides safety info to flight crews,” the FAA said on its Twitter feed. “The ground stop has been lifted.” The FAA suffered a “system outage” over night and, at one point, ordered airlines to pause all domestic departures until 9 a.m. Eastern Time to allow the agency to validate the integrity of flight and safety information. The FAA supplies critical information to pilots and Read more
The House of Commons committee that handles transportation issues this week will launch special hearings this week to examine the travel chaos that ruined the holidays for hundreds of Canadians. CTV reports the first hearing will take place on Thursday and is expected to see Transport Minister Omar Alghabra field a series of questions about what transpired and what accountability there will be. Airlines and VIA Rail also are expected to appear at before the committee. Major storms in Vancouver just prior to Christmas forced WestJet and other airlines to cancel a number of flights. Another storm moved into Ontario Read more
Canadian airlines could soon face tougher rules for delays and cancellations, a top official in the Justin Trudeau government says. Speaking in the wake of a bad bout of holiday travel chaos that left hundreds of Canadians stranded over Christmas and New Year’s, Transport Minister Omar Alghabra says the country’s recently-updated air passenger protection rules could be in for more changes that would help consumers. Alghabra told the CBC he’s looking at rules that would put the onus on airlines to deal with complaints, and not force consumers to file complaints with the Canadian Transport Agency (CTA). “Last summer and Read more
The Trudeau government says it’s making progress on passport and airport delays, but it admits there’s a lot of work to do. Federal government ministers put out a statement today saying that it’s hired more than 700 new staff for passport offices and hired 1,800 more security screening officers at airports. It also said it’s decreasing flight delays,cancellations and baggage woes, and that the average wait times at the passport call centre have significantly decreased from a peak of 108 minutes earlier this spring to 24 minutes as of August 21. “With this surge in passport requests and significant delays Read more
