"Aer Lingus effectively invited Ryanair to make another bid for the ailing Irish airline after it reported a loss of €93 million (£82 million) for the first half — almost four times the figure for the same period last year.

The airline has twice rejected bids from Ryanair but Sean Coyle, the Aer Lingus chief financial officer, said he had “no idea” if Aer Lingus would resist a third approach."

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"SEOUL — The corner office of the chairman of Korean Air overlooks the end of the runways at Gimpo International, South Korea's oldest airport.

During the 1990s, Cho Yang-Ho was often summoned there by his father, the late Cho Choong Hoon. Standing before the floor-to-ceiling windows, father and son would eyeball planes taxiing for takeoff. The heavier and better-loaded a plane, the farther it roared down the runway.

"When our aircraft would go all the way to the end of the runway, we were feeling good," says the younger Cho, chuckling at the memory. "When our aircraft would take off before other airlines, I knew our marketing team and I were in trouble."

Now that he occupies the corner office, Cho, 60, no longer uses the informal inspection method of assessing how well Korean Air is doing. The airline has expanded so much that it now flies only domestic and China- and Japan-bound flights from Gimpo. Most of its international passenger and cargo operations fly from Incheon International airport, which opened in 2001.

Under Cho's tutelage, Korean Air has shed its image of being an accident-prone airline from a developing nation to become the largest Asian carrier operating in the USA. "

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"The enterprising souls at Oxford Airport, about eight miles outside Oxford, have hit on a clever ruse. They're renaming it 'London Oxford Airport', in the hope of attracting gullible travellers by associating it with our beloved capital. .

Clever stuff, you may think. All this hullabaloo about a third runway at Heathrow, or a Thames Estuary Airport solved in the stroke of a pen. Thank goodness for rebranding!"

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"Month-to-Month expansion comes as tonnage falls 11.9 percent from last July.

A halting expansion in cargo at London Heathrow Airport accelerated in July as freight tonnage grew 5.7 percent on a month-to-month basis, giving the European gateway its busiest month this year for cargo."

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"Travellers passing through Heathrow Airport in London this week may be surprised to encounter, in the middle of bustling Terminal 5, the writer Alain de Botton, author of popular books including “How Proust Can Change Your Life” and “The Art of Travel,” seated at a desk and tapping away at his laptop computer. His typing appears in real time on a screen behind him, and a placard explains — in what apparently is both a literary and aeronautic first — that Mr. de Botton is serving a one-week appointment as Heathrow’s “writer in residence.”

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"A group of rabbis and Jewish mystics have taken to the skies over Israel, praying and blowing ceremonial trumpets to ward off swine flu.

About 50 religious leaders circled over the country on Monday, chanting prayers and blowing the horns called "shofars".

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"An international maritime hunt is underway for a missing cargo ship which is thought to be the first hijacked vessel to be sailed through the English Channel in modern times.

The Arctic Sea, a Maltese registered, Latvian-owned ship with a 15-strong Russian crew, vanished with its £1m cargo at the end of July on its way from Finland to Algeria.

British coastguards were the last people known to communicate with the ship on 29 July as it passed along the Channel but it wasn't realised at the time that anything was wrong."

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Shocking!...

"Continental Airlines diverted a Twin-Cities-bound plane to Rochester due to a storm, and then locked the entire planeload of passengers in the plane overnight for nine hours. The TSA had gone home, so the passengers couldn't clear security if they got off and left the airport, and the ground crew wouldn't let them get off and stay in the airport. So 47 people -- including babies -- were locked into the plane with no food and overflowing toilets, held prisoner until the airline could get its act together. Jesus."

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"These are the first images of the planned new £1 billion Terminal 2 at Heathrow."

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"Several passengers have been injured after a Bangkok Airways flight skidded off the runway on a popular Thai tourist island, reports said."

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