Rex Airlines has been recognised as having the South Pacific’s Best Cabin Service in the 2024 Airline Passenger Experience Association (APEX) Awards. The award was presented in Singapore last night where Rex’s Executive Chairman, Lim Kim Hai, accepted it on behalf of the airline.
The award ceremony was part of the FTE APEX Asia Expo, the air transport industry’s largest passenger experience and business performance event. APEX said nearly one million flights were anonymously rated by passengers across more than 600 airlines from around the world using a five-star scale.
Rex is Australia’s largest independent regional and domestic airline operating a fleet of 58 Saab 340 and 9 Boeing 737-800NG aircraft to 56 destinations throughout all states in Australia. In addition to the airline Rex, the Rex Group comprises wholly owned subsidiaries Pel-Air Aviation (air freight, aeromedical and charter operator), the Australian Airline Pilot Academy with campuses in Wagga Wagga and Ballarat, and propeller maintenance organisation, Australian Aerospace Propeller Maintenance. Rex is also a 50% shareholder of National Jet Express (NJE), a premier Fly-In-Fly-Out (FIFO), charter and freight operator.
BEIJING/TOKYO (Reuters) – U.S. electric carmaker Tesla Inc <TSLA> plans to slash on-site staff at its Nevada battery plant by around 75% due to the coronavirus pandemic, the local county manager said on Thursday.
The move comes after its Japanese battery partner Panasonic Corp <6752.T> said it would scale down operations at the Nevada factory this week before closing it for 14 days.
The factory produces electric motors and battery packs for Tesla’s popular Model 3 sedans.
“Tesla has informed us that the Gigafactory in Storey County is reducing on-site staff by roughly 75% in the coming days,” Austin Osborne said in a post on the county’s website.
No further details were available and it was not clear how many employees work in the factory. Tesla did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
The Reno Gazette Journal, which earlier reported the planned suspension, said Panasonic has about 3,500 employees at the Nevada plant.
Tesla said last week it would temporarily suspend production at its vehicle factory in San Francisco Bay Area from end of March 23, as well as at its New York solar roof tile factory.
However, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company will reopen the New York plant “as soon as humanly possible” to manufacture ventilators for coronavirus patients.
Two employees of Tesla have tested positive for coronavirus but have been working from home for the past two weeks and had not been symptomatic at work, Tesla said in an email to employees on Thursday. It did not disclose which unit or at what location the employees work.
(Reporting by Yilei Sun and Makiko Yamazaki; Editing by Miyoung Kim and Himani Sarkar)
SEOUL, March 26 (Reuters) – South Korea’s National Pension Service (NPS) will vote for Hanjin Group chairman Walter Cho to keep his board seat in Korean Air’s parent firm Hanjin Kal at a shareholders’ meeting on Friday, the fund said.
In a statement on Thursday, NPS said it would also approve a board seat for telecoms industry veteran Kim Shin-bae, who was nominated by Cho’s sister and an activist fund that opposed Walter Cho.
Hanjin Kal’s annual general meeting is expected to be the culmination of an intense proxy fight to decide the group’s leader.
NPS, the world’s third-largest pension fund, had a stake of 2.9% stake in Hanjin Kal by the end of 2019.
(Reporting by Joyce Lee; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
SEOUL, Oct 1 (Reuters) – South Korea showcased newly acquired F-35 stealth fighter jets to mark Armed Forces Day on Tuesday as President Moon Jae-in tried to allay concerns that his policy of engagement with North Korea would weaken the South’s commitment to defence.
At an event marking the founding of the South Korean military, Moon said South Korean fighter jets conducted patrol flights offshore, including over islands at the centre of a bitter territorial dispute with Japan.
North Korea has criticised the South’s weapons procurements and its joint military drills with the U.S. military as undisguised preparations for war that are forcing it to develop new short-range missiles.
Moon has thrown his support behind dialogue to end the North’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes, urging that working-level negotiations between the North and the United States be held soon. No new dates or locations have been set.
Moon marked Armed Forces Day at a ceremony at an airbase in the city of Daegu that highlighted four of the eight Lockheed Martin F-35A jets delivered this year. Forty of the aircraft are to be delivered by 2021.
During the event, an F-15K jet patrolled over the islands claimed by both South Korea and Japan and called Dokdo in Korea and Takeshima in Japan.
Moon made no direction mention of North Korea or Japan but said today’s security climate was highly unpredictable, requiring strength and innovation.
“As the recent drone attack in the Middle East region demonstrated to the world, the challenges that we will face will be entirely different from those of the past,” he said in an address to the military. “The war of the future will be a fight of science and intelligence against all elements that threaten our people’s safety and property.”
Analysts have said the F-35 stealth jets put North Korea’s anti-aircraft and anti-missile defence systems in a vulnerable position.
Negotiations aimed at dismantling North Korea’s nuclear and missile programmes have stalled since a second summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un broke down in February over disagreements on denuclearisation.
North Korea blamed the United States on Monday for a failure to restart talks, with Pyongyang’s U.N. ambassador Kim Song saying it was time for Washington to share proposals for talks that showed Washington had adopted a new “calculation method”.
South Korea and the United States have separately begun talks for a new military burden-sharing agreement to decide how much South Korea will pay for stationing what is now about 28,500 U.S. troops in the country.
Moon told Trump during a summit in New York last week what South Korea would contribute, including an increase in purchases of U.S. weapons and future purchase plans, a senior official at South Korea’s presidential office said.
(Reporting by Joyce Lee Editing by Jack Kim, Paul Tait and Gerry Doyle)
HANOI
(Reuters) – Fast-growing Vietnamese budget airline VietJet Aviation JSC
is expected to sign a major jet deal with Boeing Co on the sidelines of
next week’s Trump-Kim summit, according to sources familiar with the
matter.
U.S.
President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will hold
their second summit in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi on Feb 27-28.
Holding
a signing ceremony during Trump’s visit would help emphasise
strengthening economic and military ties between the United States and
Vietnam.
VietJet,
while not government-owned, increasingly uses state visits to showcase
major plane orders balanced between Boeing and Airbus SE. It signed a
deal to buy 100 Boeing 737 MAX narrowbody jets when former U.S.
President Barack Obama visited Hanoi in 2016.
The
airline is likely to finalise next week a separate provisional deal
agreed last year at the Farnborough Airshow to buy another 100 Boeing
737 MAX jets worth almost $13 billion at list prices, sources said on
condition of anonymity due to an expected announcement by VietJet.
The
U.S. Federal Aviation Administration declared last week that Vietnam
complied with international aviation standards, in a move that would
allow Vietnamese carriers to fly there for the first time and codeshare
with U.S. airlines.
VietJet
said last week it planned to purchase widebody jets capable of U.S.
flights to open routes to cities with large Vietnamese communities in
the United States, such as in California.
It might be too early for VietJet to place a widebody order, said one of the sources.
Another
source briefed on the matter said the deal for 100 737 MAX jets was
already on Boeing’s books, having been firmed up earlier and listed as
an unidentified customer.
Boeing declined to comment. VietJet did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
VietJet
finalised a deal in November with Airbus for 50 A321neo jets during a
visit to Hanoi by French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe that had also
been announced provisionally at the Farnborough Airshow.
VietJet
operates 385 flights daily within Vietnam and to places such as Japan,
Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, China, Thailand, Myanmar and
Malaysia.
However,
industry analysts have questioned whether the airline will take
delivery of all the aircraft on order as the aerospace industry reaches
the peak of an extended growth phase.
(Reporting by James Pearson in Hanoi; Additional reporting by Tim Hepher in Paris; Writing by Jamie Freed; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)
