TRAVEL

Oman Air to fly daily to Colombo

by Sapumali GALAGODA

Oman Air will fly daily to Colombo via Muscat from next month.

Oman Air Sri Lanka and Maldives Country Manager, Gihan Karunaratne

Oman Air Country Manager for Sri Lanka and Maldives Gihan Karunaratne said that in terms of inbound tourism Germany, Paris and UK are the growing markets for Sri Lanka.

The increase in the number of flights is a welcome decision and we can anticipate that this will provide a boost to the number of tourists we will bring to Sri Lanka, he said.

The country with its natural beauty and the added bonus of peace can be promoted at all times. Oman Air was very successful in promoting Sri Lanka as the preferred destination in the markets it operates.

The airline flying daily to Colombo will create more opportunities.

Inbound and outbound load capacity of Oman Airlines from January to April recorded 85 percent and 88 percent, said Karunaratne.

The best destinations for Oman Air are Muscat, London and Doha other than Sri Lanka while Milan - a new destination was introduced recently.

The launch of Oman Air's daily flights to Colombo is complemented by a tie up between the carrier and HSBC Bank.

The promotion includes a number of exciting offers for HSBC credit cardholders and is effective from June 1 to 30. Colombo is Oman Air's 32nd international destination and launched operations in November 2009 with four flights per week. Then it was increased to five flights per week.

Oman Air recently won a number of accolades with it being named as the top on time performer at London Heathrow Airport.

Alice Springs picked as new aircraft 'boneyard'

Australian desert town Alice Springs was Thursday selected to be the first aircraft "boneyard" outside the United States.

Similar to the massive Pinal Airpark in Arizona, it will take planes being decommissioned from service, which will be stripped of parts like engines, electronics and wiring to be re-cycled.

Airlines will also be able to store aircraft as big as the A380 when they are not being used.

"It's quite ground-breaking for this part of the world," Alice Springs Airport General Manager Katie Cooper told AFP.

"It will be the first one in the southern hemisphere of any significant scale. Our big market will be the Asia-Pacific carriers, because of the proximity."

Cooper said Asia Pacific Aircraft Storage Ltd chose Alice Springs because its dry, arid climate was perfect for the storage and preservation of aircraft.

It also has runway that can cater to big planes and plenty of room to expand.

"This project represents the first Asia-Pacific based alternative for customers with aircraft based, or operating through, the region," said APAS Managing Director Tom Vincent.

Cooper said work on a taxiway would start later this year with the first planes expected to arrive early next year.

Initially the site will cover 110 hectares (270 acres).

One of the best known aircraft storage areas is the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group in Arizona, "The Boneyard", which stores 4,200 US military aircraft on a 1,000 hectare site. The nearby Pinal Airpark provides storage for civilian aircraft. AFP

Iceland volcano eruption all but over: Experts

The eruption of Iceland's Grimsvoetn volcano has tailed off and its ash plume has almost disappeared, experts and officials said on Wednesday, refusing though to declare the flight-disrupting incident closed.

"The plume is very low, a couple of hundred metres," or 600-700 feet, Urdur Gunnarsdottir, a spokeswoman for the civil crisis management agency told AFP after a midday (1200 GMT) update.

The remaining plume appeared mainly to comprise steam, not ash, she said.

"It's much reduced, but there is still ... danger of occasional explosions or a puff coming up," she said, adding: "I don't think we want to pronounce it dead until it's dead."

Iceland's most active volcano, located at the heart of its biggest glacier, Vatnajoekull, in the southeast, began erupting Saturday, spewing a column of smoke and ash as high as 20 kilometres (12 miles) into the air.

It was the most dramatic start to an eruption in a century by Grimsvoetn, which erupted nine times between 1922 and 2004.

But the plume quickly declined to between 10 and 15 kilometres on Sunday, fell to around five kilometres on Tuesday morning and to just two kilometres by Tuesday evening, according to official measurements.

Icelandic authorities have stressed that a low-level eruption could continue for weeks and on Wednesday urged people to stay at a safe distance.

Icelandic Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir said, though, "the worst is over" and cleaning up the thick ashy smothering could begin.

Iceland, which suffered a deep economic crisis after major banks went belly-up in 2008, "has been struck by a natural disaster," Sigurdardottir said.

"The government is already preparing a number of measures to assist residents, clean up the areas affected by volcanic ash, and return farming and other economic pursuits to normal," she said.

The road past the glacier was reopened late Tuesday for the first time since the eruption began, police said.

And in the small village of Kirkjubaejarklausur, at the edge of the glacier, most of the brown-grey dust that had blanketed it for days was gone Wednesday and life appeared to be getting back to normal.

Ash briefly closed Iceland's main airport overnight and caused disruptions to some air travel in Europe in Wednesday, especially Germany, which saw brief airspace closures and some 450 flight cancellations.

But the closures were due to old ash, Gunnarsdottir said.

"There has not been any ash emitted into higher altitudes for 24 hours at least. It is the ash emitted for the first 36 hours of the eruption that is causing the problem."

Just over a year ago, ash spewing from another volcano, Eyjafjoell, caused the biggest aerial shutdown in Europe since World War II, affecting more than 100,000 flights and eight million passengers.

According to an official calculation, Grimsvoetn spewed out more ash into the atmosphere in the first 24 hours of its eruption than Eyjafjoell did over 40 days.

In Paris, French vulcanologist Patrick Allard said the fact there had been two eruptions little more than a year apart did not mean volcanoes were becoming more active, in Iceland or globally.

"It's a coincidence," said Allard, a specialist at the Institute of the Physics of the Globe in Paris (IPGP). "These eruptions are separate from each other. They were produced by two volcanoes which have their own magma system and are more than 200 kilometres apart."

Allard warned, though, of the risk of a violent eruption of the volcano Hekla, about some 60 kilometres northwest of Eyjafjoell.

For the last 60 years, Hekla has sprung into life every 10 years or so. Its last burst was in 2000, "and it is now showing pre-eruption signs," Allard said.

AFP

Singapore Airlines to set up new low-cost carrier

Singapore Airlines (SIA) said it will launch within one year a new budget airline using wide-body aircraft to tap into growing consumer demand for low-cost travel over longer distances.

SIA already runs a short-haul mid-price airline called SilkAir and owns 32.9 percent of budget carrier Tiger Airways but said it decided to establish the new subsidiary after "an extensive review and analysis" of the market.

It did not give a name for the future airline, saying more details will be announced "in due course" including its branding, services and routes.

"Operations are expected to begin within one year.

The airline will be wholly owned by Singapore Airlines, but will be operated independently and managed separately from SIA," the company said in a press statement.

SIA said the new carrier will "enable the airline to serve a largely untapped new market and cater to the growing demand among consumers for low-fare travel."

The move will put the new carrier in competition with AirAsia X, the long-haul affiliate of Malaysian budget carrier AirAsia and British tycoon Richard Branson's Virgin Group.

Unlike most other budget airlines using single-aisle planes for short hops, the new carrier will operate widebody, double-aisle aircraft to ply medium- and long-haul routes.

"We are seeing a new market segment being created and this will provide another growth opportunity for the SIA Group," SIA Chief Executive Goh Choon Phong said.

"As we have observed on short-haul routes within Asia, low-fare airlines help stimulate demand for travel, and we expect this will also prove true for longer flights."

Shukor Yusof, an aviation analyst with Standard and Poor's Equities Research, said SIA was making a foray into a largely untapped market, which is dominated in the region by AirAsia X.

AirAsiaX flies to 14 destinations - London, Taipei, Tehran, Paris, Seoul, Tokyo, China (Tianjin, Hangzhou, Chengdu), Australia (Gold Coast, Melbourne, Perth) and India (Mumbai, Delhi).

"If you look around, there's only AirAsia X in this region that's doing low-cost long-haul or medium- to long-haul flights. So essentially there's an opportunity to make money," Shukor told AFP.

"If you look at the recent financial year you can see that they (SIA) obviously need another avenue to grow their business."

SIA said on that full-year net profit rebounded strongly from the global recession as travel demand recovered.

It earned Sg$1.09 billion ($873 million) in the financial year ended March 31, up fivefold from Sg$216 million a year ago while revenues rose 14 percent to Sg$14.5 billion.

SIA cautioned that the near-term outlook was expected to be difficult due to surging oil prices, concerns over the US economy, the impact from Japan's quake-tsunami disasters and worries over Europe's sovereign debt crisis.

AFP