The engine of an Asiana Airbus A380 has caught fire during refueling at Seoul airport yesterday.

According to AeroTime the A380 registered HL7652, was about to carry out flight OZ202 to Los Angeles International Airport (LAX).

During a start-up test, smoke and sparks were seen from the Rolls Royce Trent 970 engine which then caught fire.

READ: Air New Zealand brings relief for tall passengers 

Airport emergency services put out the fire.

However, at the time, none of the 401 passengers had boarded.

?? Engine one of an Asiana Airbus A380 was seen caught fire during fueling at Seoul International Airport.

Video via weibo.pic.twitter.com/D2SA3PzUct

— air plus news (english) (@airplusnews_EN) October 18, 2019

It’s fascinating to mark the evolution of the 787 from a long haul fixture to a domestic workhorse, with Japan Airlines (JAL) putting its first domestic 787-8 aircraft to work this month between Tokyo Haneda and Seoul Itami, and later this year between Haneda and Fukuoka.

Launch customer and Japan Airlines domestic competitor All Nippon Airways has long used its early (and therefore less efficient) Dreamliners on its domestic network, but few other airlines have high-capacity domestic versions of the Dreamliner.

This is particularly true of the more recent lighter and more efficient versions that have, by many airlines, been called “too much airplane” to be

Watch dramatic video of Asiana A380 engine on fire

In a fleet context, JAL has some of the world’s densest Boeing 777 aircraft for its domestic trunk routes like Tokyo Haneda to Osaka Itami and Sapporo New Chitose, including its 500-seater two-class Boeing 777-300 configuration.

The airline also currently has a fleet of 35 Boeing 767s, according to the fleet tracking site airfleets.net. Six of these are the non-ER 767-300 version largely used for medium-sized domestic routes or off-peak large routes, including Itami.

Interestingly, these are not particularly old planes as the 767s in commercial operation go: one was delivered in 1995, two in 1997, one in 1999 and two as recently as 2002.

JAL and its associated airline brands also operate a large fleet of 737-800s for city pairs with lower demand, as well as a variety of regional aircraft from Embraer E-Jets to turboprops for regional or very-low-demand services.

This new aircraft is a high-density version, with 291 seats on board: 6 in first class, 58 in the unique Class J (which is sort of like an international premium economy product), and 227 seats in regular economy. Not quite the 335 seats on Scoot’s denser 787-8s, but not too far off either.

First class is laid out in a 2-2-2 configuration, with deeply reclining and very private seats from the Japanese seatmaker Jamco.

Class J, meanwhile, is in the standard 2-3-2 premium economy layout for the 787, making this the most spacious and overall best passenger experience of Class J in the fleet, where the 777 sees a 2-4-2 layout and the 737-800s the unusual 2-3 configuration. The seats are the Recaro PL3530.

It’s interesting that JAL selected this configuration given that it would have had the option to take eight-abreast 2-4-2 seating for Class J, which is the layout it uses in international economy on the 787.

It is, indeed, the only airline to retain the 2-4-2 configuration in economy on its long-haul Dreamliners, where other airlines use 3-3-3.

But on this domestic shuttle route the economy class seating is going to be 3-3-3, but with the remarkably impressive Recaro CL3710, more often seen on long-haul aircraft.

In comparison with the Boeing 767s, these aircraft are directly replacing, that’s something like an inch less seat width, but it’s not dissimilar to the high-density 777 aircraft that it will be flying alongside.

Overall, it’s an upgrade from the 767 in Class J and adds first class, but in economy it’s going to be a little more squashy down the back — mitigated substantially by the choice of the comfortable Recaro seats.

The first flight of the new configuration will take place at the end of this month, between Tokyo Haneda and Osaka Itami.

JAL offers over a dozen flights a day between these two airports alone, not counting their international airports at Narita and Kansai, and the 787-8 will be flying alongside the Boeing 767 and Boeing 777 widebodies the airline also uses on these routes — as well as low-cost carriers’ narrowbodies and ANA’s widebodies.

A big boost to Cathay Pacific’s inflight entertainment means customers can now fly non-stop around the world 45 times without watching the same thing twice.

The Hong Kong-based airline is boosting the content on its entertainment system four-fold and says passengers can look forward to more newly released movies, sports coverage, complete boxsets and Asian content.

It has also recently made available live coverage of sports events to allow passengers to follow their favorite games.

READ: JetBlue, Norwegian to link networks with promise of cheaper fares

The airline has partnered with channel Sport 24 to offer customers on its A350 aircraft live coverage which this month includes the Rugby World Cup and next year will feature the Tokyo Olympics.

When it comes to films, a new agreement with streaming service and independent entertainment film specialist MUBI will give passengers access to remastered classics and films that didn’t make it to the local cinema.

The carrier is also one of the first to offer multi-season box sets that allow passengers to binge on their favorite series.

It also boasts one of the biggest airline libraries of Asian content that includes specially curated collections compiled by renowned celebrities and entertainment experts.

“Our passengers are always telling us how much they enjoy having high-quality entertainment when they travel, so weʼre delighted to be giving them so much more new, exciting content to explore,’’ said Cathay manager customer experience and design Vivian Lo.

Pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong have had a serious impact on Cathay’s traffic and prompted it to make capacity changes on some routes.

It now plans to slightly reduced capacity in the 2019 winter season as opposed to its original plan of more than 6 percent growth over the period

Figures for August showed a year-on-year fall of 11.3 percent in the combined passenger numbers at Cathay Pacific and Cathay Dragon.

The passenger load factor also fell by 7.2 percentage points to 79.9 percent.

The airline said overall tourist arrivals in Hong Kong in August were nearly half what they usually were in what was traditionally a strong summer month.

Inbound traffic was down 38 percent while outbound fell 12 percent.

JetBlue and Norwegian Air plan to join forces in an interline agreement they say will boost competition and provide cheaper fares across the Atlantic.

They have signed a Letter of Intent and plan to launch the partnership in the early northern summer of 2020 with booking starting early next year.

The deal will allow customers to buy a single low fare for connecting flights between the Americas and Europe as well as check their baggage through to their final destination.

Interline agreements also generally offer greater protection against delays and missed connections.

The partnership will connect more than 60 US  and almost  40 Caribbean and Latin American cities to Norwegian’s network offering 20 nonstop routes to Europe via New York-JFK, Boston and Fort Lauderdale airports.

JetBlue, which has said it will begin flying its own flights to London from both New York and Boston from 2021, said the deal would provide more competition.

READ: Twitter survey of US airlines shows all you need is LUV.

“Norwegian shares our belief that customers benefit when we can bring competition and low fares to the transatlantic market currently dominated by joint ventures, legacy alliances and sky-high ticket prices,” chief executive Robin Haynes said in the announcement.

Norwegian recently announced plans o boost frequencies on flights between the US and its most popular European destinations in the 2020 summer season.

Among the beneficiaries is Los Angeles-Paris, which moves to double daily flights on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays and 10 frequencies per week,  and New York-Paris, which will now run double daily services on Mondays and Saturdays and nine flights per week.

Fort Lauderdale and Boston were also due to gain an additional weekly service.

“We are very excited to partner with JetBlue as this will make international travel even smoother and more available for our customers, Norwegian acting chief executive Geir Karlsen said.

”JetBlue is the largest airline at several of our key gateways in the United States, specifically New York JFK, Boston and Fort Lauderdale, and this partnership will create a plethora of new route connections for customers on both sides of the Atlantic.

“The partnership will provide travelers throughout the US, Caribbean and Latin America with more affordable fares to Europe and vice versa.

“And not least it will offer seamless connections with two of the most awarded low-cost airlines in the world.”

Music legend Bo Diddley once asked “Who do you Love?” and when it comes to US carriers, a recent survey of twitter posts suggests it’s still Southwest Airlines.

Online travel insurers Insuremytrip monitored 96,000 tweets mentioning the nine biggest US airlines over two weeks and found Southwest, whose stockmarket ticker symbol is LUV,  rated the highest with seven in 10 twitter posts positive.

Not far behind was Allegiant Air (64.4 percent positive) followed by Alaska Airlines (62.1 percent positive).

READ: Passengers, sick of queuing, demand more control.

Delta led the big three with 51.3 percent of its tweets positive followed by United (50.5 percent) and American (44.2 percent).

Also recording more positive tweets than negative was JetBlue — but only just at 50.5 percent.

When it came to the question of who don’t you love, Spirit Airlines was a resounding last with just 31 percent of its tweets positive. Frontier Airlines was also a poor performer with 36.3 percent of mentions positive.

The survey looked at what was causing negative mentions for each airline and found delays were the biggest source of frustration across all airlines except Spirit, where cancellations topped the list.

United had the highest number of mentions for delays and more than a third of its negative tweets related to cancellations or delays.

Spirit complaints for these two areas topped 35 percent, the highest of any airline.

“While every airline experiences delays and cancellations due to factors out of their control, it seems United Airlines and Spirit Airlines are particularly substandard in the way they handle customers in these situations,’’ Insuremytrip said.

“Interestingly, Southwest Airlines (who received the least negative mentions overall) see their biggest complaint is about money, while the rest of the airlines have limited complaints about this.

“Furthermore, Southwest Airlines received the highest proportion of negative mentions for keywords regarding seating (15.7%), which may be due to their policy on not assigning seats.

“To conclude, while we cannot infer that this means one airline has more issues than another, it certainly gives us an idea of what each airline struggles with the most.”

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