Jake Nelson

In its Australian Aviation Network Overview report for November 2023, Airservices Australia said international traffic is accelerating ahead of its forecasts, a notable difference from the early stages of the pandemic recovery which were mainly fuelled by the domestic rebound.

The demonstration flight will take off from HARS Aviation Museum at Shellharbour Airport at 10:30am on Friday. The plane, dubbed the largest “close replica” aircraft in the world, has been restored by HARS over the past 12 years since the society purchased it in 2010.

The grounding, which affects an unspecified number of Defence’s Spartan aircraft, comes after the US Coast Guard suspended use of all 14 of its Spartans, finding that each had cracks of “varying degrees” and saying they would remain grounded until a “thorough evaluation” was completed.

Airservices’ Melbourne ARFF Training Academy took out a platinum award for Best in Virtual Reality at the LearnX Awards for its use of XVR Simulation training software during firefighting training workshops.

The rainbow livery has been added to the nine-year-old A320-200 VH-VFY, which returned to Jetstar’s domestic network on Wednesday after its repainting in the airline’s Melbourne engineering hangar.

The airline has selected the conventional take-off and landing (CTOL) version of the ALIA battery-electric aircraft for its fleet, with the first expected to be in service for cargo flights with NZ Post by 2026. Air New Zealand has a firm order for one ALIA, with options for an extra two and rights for a further 20.