The Biden administration is going after airline credit cards for being an alleged slight-of-fiscal-hand. Lufthansa called Boeing “annoying” because it’s shipping out planes too slowly. And a certain former president’s very fancy plane experienced a minor collision.
Take a moment to catch up on what’s been happening in the world of airlines.
That airline credit card in your wallet may not be as financially savvy as you think — which is why the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau held a hearing to call out what it said were deceptive practices behind the plastic.
Another day, another airline CEO publicly grumbling about how long they’re having to wait on unfulfilled orders from Boeing. This time, it was Carsten Spohr of Lufthansa expressing some tight-lipped annoyance at the planemaker, in an interview with the Swiss newspaper Neue Zuercher Zeitung.
In April, the Department of Transportation told U.S. airlines that they would need to start disclosing all of the fees customers need to pay to buy a plane ticket. Now the airlines are suing to block that rule.
Boeing’s orders and deliveries page on its website says that the company delivered 24 planes to customers last month — the fewest since February 2022. Sixteen of those deliveries were the troubled 737 Max models. While the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) says Boeing can only make 38 of them a month, it has struggled to make even 10 in that timeframe.
The latest Boeing plane running into turbulence? It belongs to Donald Trump. The former U.S. president’s private Boeing 757 ran into another plane on the runway at West Palm Beach International Airport on Sunday. Nobody was injured in the accident.
Though Uber is usually associated with for-hire vehicles that will take you from one place of your choosing to another place of your choosing, the company just unveiled a new service that might sound familiar to the car-free among us.
United Airlines got a bit of good news this week. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) told the carrier that it can have more freedom to design new routes and add new planes to its fleet. Bloomberg reports that “after a careful review and discussion about the proactive safety steps United has taken to date,” the company told employees in a memo that the restrictions had been lifted.