Plane crashes after take off at La Havana Airport

   More than 100 people have died after a Boeing 737 airliner crashed and exploded near Jose Marti International Airport in Havana, Cuban state media says.

   Three people have survived but are in a critical condition in hospital, Cuban Communist Party newspaper Granma reported.

   The plane came down shortly after take-off, crashing in a field.
It was carrying 104 passengers and nine foreign crew, according to local media.
"There has been an unfortunate aviation accident. The news is not very promising, it seems that there is a high number of victims," Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel was quoted as saying.

   The airliner had been leased by state airline Cubana de Aviación from the Mexican company Damojh, Cuban news agency Prensa Latina said.

   State TV said it was an internal flight from the Cuban capital to the city of Holguin, in the east of the island.

   Images showed a thick column of smoke rising above the crash site. Fire crews and ambulances are at the scene.

   Radio Havana Cuba said on Twitter that the plane came down on the "highway" between Boyeros and Havana, near the airport.

Image caption Emergency services are at the scene of the accident 

New Ryanair strategy to boost profit on passengers

   Budget airline Ryanair has slashed its free-of-charge check in time from four days to just 48 hours. 

The new rules come into effect for departures from June 13 but those who have paid an extra £4 for an assigned seat will still be able to check in 60 days in advance.

   It means millions of passengers travelling with the Dublin-based carrier may have to search around for internet connections while abroad to download their boarding pass. 

  Ryanair has slashed its free-of-charge check in time further from four days to just 48 hours

Ryanair charges £55 for anyone who turns up to the airport for a flight without a printed out boarding pass or one downloaded to their phone.
  

   Two years ago, customers could check in up to seven days before their flight, which worked well for those on longer breaks as they could download passes for both legs of their trip at the same time.

It then reduced this to four days and now it will be just 48 hours. 

   News of the check-in changes quickly sparked conversation on Twitter, with passengers calling it 'confusing'.

   Kara Newsome tweeted: '@Ryanair I'm confused by your new check in rules. I now have to check in online between 48-2 hours before my flight. 

'What happens when I'm on holiday and have no way of getting online or to a printer before my journey?'

    News of the check-in changes quickly sparked conversation on Twitter, with commenters calling it 'confusing'

   Meanwhile, Shane McKinney added: '@Ryanair your new check-in policy is a disgrace. 

'Praying on people that aren’t technologically inclined enough to check in for return flights when abroad. Screwing over your own customers AGAIN.'

   Ryanair has already contacted passengers who have booked flights and will be impacted by the new check-in rules.

   Commenting on the changes, a Ryanair spokesperson told MailOnline Travel: 'Online check-in (for those customers who don’t choose reserved seats) will be available from 48 hours to 2 hours pre-departure for all flights from Wednesday, June 13.

   'This is more than double the 24 hour check-in period operated by British Airways, Lufthansa, Norwegian and Iberia. This will give reserve seat customers more time to select their preferred seats prior to departure.'  

   It means millions of passengers may have to search around for internet connections while abroad to download their boarding pass. Ryanair charges £55 for anyone…

   It means millions of passengers may have to search around for internet connections while abroad to download their boarding pass. Ryanair charges £55 for anyone who turns up to the airport for a flight without one printed out or a pass downloaded to their phone

   Although other airlines do have smaller check-in windows - British Airways' is 24 hours and Aer Lingus 30 hours - customers are rarely charged to check-in at the airport and they are also able reserve a desired seat free-of-charge.

    It marks another significant change in policy for the airline, who also changed the rules regarding their cabin bag allowance earlier this year.

   Customers are now only able to carry a bag no larger than 35cm x 20cm x 20cm on board, with larger bags being placed in the hold free of charge.

   If they wish to take an extra piece of hand luggage, they must pay an extra £5 for priority boarding when booking their tickets.  

Plane collision at Istambul Airport

MH370 captain 'deliberately evaded radar' during final moments of doomed flight

Aviation experts believe they may have solved the mystery of the disappearance of flight MH370, saying the 239 passengers and crew were the victims of a deliberate, criminal act carried out by the plane’s captain.

The fate of the Boeing 777 has mystified investigators ever since it went missing en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in 2014.

However, a panel of experts assembled for the Australian TV programme 60 Minutes says the evidence suggests Captain Zaharie Amad Shah executed a careful series of manoeuvres to evade detection and ensure the plane disappeared in a remote location.

   Martin Dolan, former head of the Australia Transport Safety Bureau, who led the two-year search for the missing plane, said: “This was planned, this was deliberate, and it was done over an extended period of time.”

   The plane was presumed to have flown on autopilot before running out of fuel and plunging into the southern Indian Ocean. However, the wreckage has never been found and the search was suspended in January last year.

    'MH370 crashed north of search' The panel suggested a more gradual descent could mean the search was concentrated in the wrong area and that the plane could still be found largely intact.

Simon Hardy, a Boeing 777 instructor, said Captain Zaharie avoided detection by flying a careful course along the winding border between Malaysian and Thai air space, crossing in and out of radar cover on either side.

   So both of the controllers aren’t bothered about this mysterious aircraft. Cause it’s, ‘Oh, it's gone. It’s not in our space any more,’” he told the programme, which was broadcast on Sunday.

“If you were commissioning me to do this operation and try and make a 777 disappear, I would do exactly the same thing.”

   He also pointed out the Malaysian captain had made an unexplained turn to fly over his home town of Penang.

   “Somebody was looking out the window, It might be a long, emotional goodbye or a short, emotional goodbye to his home town,” he said.

   Larry Vance, a veteran air crash investigator, told the programme the public could be confident in a growing consensus about the plane’s final moments and that the pilot was intent on killing himself.

“Unfortunately, he was killing everybody else on board, and he did it deliberately,” he added.

Another case of racist discrimination on board United Airlines flight

   An African woman and her children were kicked off a United Airlines flight after a fellow passenger complained that she had a “pungent” odor, according to a racial discrimination lawsuit filed against the company.

   The incident involving the passenger, a white male, happened two years ago, when Queen Obioma, a Nigerian citizen, and her two children were boarding a flight from Houston to San Francisco. The family had flown from Lagos, Nigeria, and were on the second leg of a three-flight journey to Ontario, Canada.

   Obioma saw that the other passenger had sat in her assigned seat in the business-class cabin, according to the lawsuit, which was filed Friday in federal court in Houston. The passenger refused to move, so a flight crew member, instead, asked Obioma to sit elsewhere in business class.

   Later, before takeoff, Obioma went to use the bathroom. On her way back to her seat, the same passenger was standing in the aisle and blocking her from getting to her seat, the lawsuit says. She said “excuse me” three times, but was ignored. After several minutes, Obioma managed to squeeze her way to her seat.

   But just after she sat down, a crew member told Obioma to go outside the aircraft, where another employee told her that she would be removed from the flight. The lawsuit says the pilot had personally requested that she be removed because the male passenger, who was not identified, had complained that her smell was “pungent” and that he was not comfortable flying with her.
“At that point Ms. Obioma was lost, confused and disoriented. Her mind went blank and she was utterly befuddled,” according to the complaint.


  Best and Worst Airlines for International Flights Obioma explained that she was taking her children to school in Canada for the first time and that they had appointments they could not miss. Despite her situation, crew members refused to let Obioma back onto the aircraft and removed the entire family from the flight.

   “Ms. Obioma watched her minor children marched out of the aircraft like criminals, confused and perplexed. … She sobbed uncontrollably for a long time,” the complaint says, adding that the children, who were seated in the economy cabin, were humiliated.

   A United spokeswoman said in a statement that the company has not been served with the lawsuit and is unable to comment because of the pending litigation.

   The lawsuit alleges that United Airlines discriminated against Obioma and her children during the incident on March 4, 2016, at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston because they were black. It also accuses crew members of singling out Obioma, not because she was being disruptive, but because a white man — who refused to sit in his assigned seat — did not want to share a plane with her.

 The mother and her children waited for five hours before they could get on another flight, and they missed their scheduled appointments. Obioma also incurred more expenses, the lawsuit says.
United has struggled with customer service issues.

   In April 2017, a viral video showed Chicago airport security officers forcibly dragging a passenger from a flight. The removal of David Dao, who was seen with a bloodied mouth in the video, resulted in the firing of two airport security officers and suspension of two others. Dao reached an undisclosed settlement with United a few weeks after the incident, according to the Associated Press. Last month, one of the fired security officers, James Long, sued United and the city of Chicago, claiming he wasn’t properly trained to deal with the situation and that he had been defamed, CBS reported.
Then in July, a passenger had to hold her 2-year-old son in her lap for more than three hours because the airline had sold his seat to a standby passenger.

   And in March, a passenger’s 10-month-old puppy suffocated to death after a flight attendant forced the owner to place it in an overhead compartment.

Terror as an aircraft flies really low over a resident area

"You could see the pilot": Terror as passenger jet flies so low over neighbourhood residents thought it was crashing"

Furious residents have hit out after a passenger jet flew so low over their neighbourhood they thought the plane was about to crash.

The aircraft flew as low as 2,000ft over north Bristol as manufacturer Airbus carried out an internal noise test on its new A321LR Neo model.

Residents told of panic and said it was "stupid" for the France-based firm not to warn locals ahead of time, the Bristol Post reports.

 

One resident said: "It was so low you could see the pilot."

The £95million aircraft completed a low flyover above Filton, Patchway and Almondsbury on Thursday afternoon while en route to Cardiff after taking off from Airbus' headquarters in Toulouse.

The A321LR Neo will not complete any commercial flights until the end of 2018.

Residents who witnessed the plane in the skies over Bristol described the aircraft as “amazing”, though some said they were concerned seeing it fly so low.

 Adrian Lewis “How stupid without pre-warning people,” one resident wrote on social media. “Was so low to my mum’s house, she was home alone and panicked.

“I was also at home with my children, it sounded and looked like it was going to crash!”
Another resident, posting on Facebook, said: “It was so low you could see the pilot. Was great having an aircraft passover.”

In response to reports that some residents were “panicked”, an Airbus spokesperson said the pilot flew over Filton as low as regulations would allow - which is approximately 2,000ft.

The spokesperson said: “[Thursday’s] flyover was part of our testing of the A321LR Neo aircraft.
“It was in relation to internal noise measuring. The flight path was from Toulouse to Cardiff, and then along to Maidenhead before returning to Toulouse.

“There are really strict rules about how low pilots can fly but they can go to a certain height to do manoeuvres, like simulating the start of a landing and operating the landing gear.

 
“[Thursday's] aircraft will not have gone any lower than 2,000 feet - that’s the limit.”

The A321LR is currently undergoing a nearly 100 hour test-flight programme, which included the Filton flyover.

The Airbus spokesperson said it was not always possible to pre-warn residents because of the last-minute nature of test flights.

They added: “We don’t always get a lot of notice. The test flights are led in Toulouse and we were only made aware of this particular flight a few days before.

“It was meant to take place last week but it was cancelled because of the weather.

“From an external communications perspective, we did tweet about this flight but they can sometimes be cancelled at the last minute.”

Airbus' UK Twitter account tweeted about four hours before the flyover, writing: "Looking forward to the low-and-slow flypast by the #Airbus A321LR Neo over the Filton site at around 2.30pm today as part of the aircraft’s test programme."