Low-cost giant Ryanair has warned it could move “some or all” of its UK-based aircraft to Europe unless it receives certainty about operations after Brexit.

Ryanair said on Monday it remained concerned about the uncertainty surrounding the UK’s departure from the European Union from March, 2019, and whether Britain would remain a party to the EU Open Skies agreement.

The airline, which has almost 90 aircraft in the UK, campaigned against Brexit and strongly supports staying with the open skies agreement.

It is worried there will neither the time nor the goodwill to allow a bilateral treaty to be negotiated if this proves not to be the case and that the policy chaos could result in flight disruptions.

“We, like all airlines, seek clarity on this issue before we publish our summer 2019 schedule in the second quarter of 2018,’’ Ryanair said in a statement announcing a 55 per cent rise in first-quarter profits.

 “If we do not have certainty about the legal basis for the operation of flights between the UK and the EU by autumn 2018, we may be forced to cancel flights and move some, or all, of our UK based aircraft to Continental Europe from April ’19 onwards.

“We have contingency plans in place and will, as always, adapt to changed circumstances in the best interests of our customers and shareholders.’’

The warning came as Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary also revealed the group was one of 10 companies to submit “non-binding” offers for financially crippled Alitalia.

The failed airline is being propped up by an Italian government bridging loan while special administrators determine whether it should be sold, restructured or liquidated.

It was placed under special administration after unions rejected a restructuring plan backed by the airline’s investors, including 49 per cent stakeholder Etihad.

Potential suitors have until October to submit a binding proposal but O’Leary said Ryanair would only do so if there was significant restructuring that allowed the Italian carrier to operate on a profitable basis.

There would also need to be "an absence of Italian government interference," the BBC quoted him as saying.

Ryanair reported a first-quarter of €397 million, up from €256m in the same quarter last year, but noted the figures were distorted by the timing of Easter.

Traffic for the quarter grew 12 per cent to 35 million customers with passenger loads hitting a record 96 per cent.

Average fares rose by 1 per cent to just over €40 as the strong April traffic was offset by factors such unfavourable currency movements, lower bag revenue and terrorist attacks in Manchester and London.

The airline took delivery of 14 new Boeing 737s during the quarter and said new bases in Frankfurt Main and Naples were doing well.

“We will launch two new bases in Memmingen (Munich) and Poznan in the autumn and open 170 new routes for winter ’17,’’ it said. “We continue to see significant growth opportunities for Ryanair across Europe as competitors close bases or move capacity and legacy airlines restructure.”

Ryanair now expects to carry 131 million people in the 2018 financial year, up 1 million on its previous estimate.

It said it expected the pricing environment to remain “very competitive” in the second half with traffic growth of about 7 per cent and fares falling 8 per cent.

It maintained its after-tax profit guidance of  €1.40bn to €1.45bn but added: "This guidance remains heavily dependent on close-in summer bookings, H2 average fares and the absence of any further security events, ATC strikes or negative Brexit developments.”

Australia’s safety regulator will have access to safety information from hundreds of airlines after signing a deal with the International Air Transport Association.

The deal will give the Civil Aviation Safety Authority access to the audit details of more than 400 carriers on the IATA Operational Safety Audit (IOSA) and makes Australia the first country in the Asia-Pacific to use the audit as part of its safety oversight.

CASA already has access to information from the US Federal Aviation Administration and European Aviation Safety Agency authorities but this will be the first time it will also be able to get details from IOSA audits.

The Australian regulator says it expects the additional information to make its surveillance and audits more efficient and effective.

IOSA is compulsory for IATA members but non-members also sign up for it on a voluntary basis.

Introduced to help reduce the rate of airline fatal accidents, it is an internationally nationally recognised audit that looks at operational management and control systems at an airline.

Carriers taking part in the audit tend to have a better overall safety record than those that don’t.  IATA says the total accident rate for IOSA carriers between 2011 and 2015 was 3.3 times lower than the rate for non-IOSA operators.

Acting CASA aviation safety director Graeme Crawford said CASA would use the IOSA information to complement the existing surveillance and oversight of foreign airlines.

Crawford said CASA had worked closely with IATA to understand the organisation’s audit process, quality assurance and management of approved auditors.

“It will also be used as part of the assessment process for new foreign carriers seeking authorisation to operate to Australia,’’ Crawford said in the latest CASA Briefing newsletter.

 “In the future, we expect to have access to IOSA information in relation to Australian carriers, which will be used to support our existing audit and surveillance work.’’

IATA senior vice president safety and flight operation Gilberto Lopez-Meyer said sharing IOSA information with regulators reduced the burden and costs of safety oversight.

Other agreements to share IOSA information are in place with the FAA, EASA and China.

Blake Scholl, 36, former Amazon manager and internet entrepreneur, is the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, a start-up from Denver/Colorado.

Boom is aiming at bringing to market the first supersonic passenger airliner since Concorde, with entry into service planned from 2023. In  2018, a two-seater demonstrator aircraft dubbed “Baby Boom” is supposed to fly.

At the Paris Air Show,  Boom revealed that currently 76 of the 55-seat production-type jets have been reserved by five undisclosed major airlines with substantial, non-refundable down payments. Andreas Spaeth exclusively talked to Scholl recently.

AirlineRatings: How did you get hooked on supersonic travel, without ever having flown on Concorde?

Blake Scholl: It started in 2007 when I was working at an internet start-up in Seattle.  One day my girlfriend was stuck on one of these slow, hopelessly delayed flights, and when I was waiting for her I thought: ‘What happened to Concorde and supersonic flight?’.  But there was no credible effort to build a supersonic aircraft I could see myself flying on. There was just some Science Fiction stuff. Or maybe a private jet for billionaires – I said well, that’s not for me. I thought: Could I start a company to build a supersonic jet? I thought the answer would be ‘No’. I started to look at it more seriously three years ago, I thought I would do two weeks of research and get the whole idea out of my system.

Q: But you obviously didn’t, why not?

Scholl: The more I learned the more I realized that we actually can do it. It’s hard but it’s possible, as in fact we already have all the key technology we need. Relative to Concorde, we have had 50 years of progress in how we build aircraft. We’ve got better ways of optimized aerodynamics, we have new materials like carbon-fibre composites, we have significantly quieter and more efficient engines. If you take all these things together you can build a new-generation supersonic airplane that costs 75% less to fly than Concorde. And once we realized that we said: Either we have no courage, or we want to start this company and do it.

Q: Boom is deliberately clinging on to existing technology rather than going into the unknown. So how do you actually exploit the progress made since Concorde?

Scholl: We use state of the art technology, the same that is on the latest subsonic airplanes. Aerodynamics, materials and propulsion are the three big categories. From an aerodynamics perspective, it used to be you had to design an airplane in a wind tunnel. It takes about six months, meaning you can’t do very many tests and can’t touch many designs. Today’s computer simulations, in contrast, are really good, you can do all your optimization in the computer, meaning you can do six months of work in half an hour. And you can test thousands of more design ideas than you could before, which means you can find better ones and you end up with a refined aerodynamic shape of the airplane, with more lift and less drag. New materials mean you can come up with a very complex shape of the airplane, it turns out the way you want it to, it’s hard to find a straight line on our aircraft. With composites, you mould the parts into any shape you want them.

Q: For the engines you stick with fairly known technology, at least with your demonstrator ‘Baby Boom’, why?

Scholl: Yes, the production aircraft will use the same turbofan technology that’s in an Airbus or Boeing aircraft. ‘Baby Boom’ will use a small old engine, because that’s what fits the airplane. We know it’s going to work with the turbofans for supersonic, the engine manufacturers have done the work on their side, and they know it’s working, too. Basically, you take three existing wide-body engines to power a much smaller airplane, so you’ve got a lot more thrust. The way you adapt the engines themselves is: For subsonic, you want these great big fans at the front. It turns out for supersonic, however, you want a medium size, a much smaller fan. You need a compromise about being quiet at the airport and being fuel efficient at high speed. But it’s the same technology as on other aircraft, you just adapt it. Basically, you just change the fan size, which is a straightforward thing to do, the same technology that’s flying today, you are adapting it for high speed. We haven’t chosen an engine supplier yet, as we are talking with everybody.

Q: What about engine noise and also about the sonic boom a supersonic aircraft inevitably produce?

Scholl: The engine noise at the airport will be 30 times quieter than Concorde, which was really loud. And we don’t use afterburners on take-off, which is a big factor. And on the sonic boom side, it is also quieter by a factor of 30 versus Concorde, so the Boom passenger airliner will be 30 times quieter both at the airport and with the sonic boom it causes.

Q: Serious scientists argue that the speed of Mach 2.2 you are aiming at, 10% faster than Concorde, is unrealistic. Is it?

Scholl: The opposite, I think the lower speeds aimed for by other projects are actually the problem. The point of supersonic is not to save you an hour here and there. That would be great, but it wouldn’t be transformative. The power of supersonic is when you change where you can go, when you can save entire days off of a trip. The most important travel route around the world for business today is New York to London. If you catch the first flight of the day from New York, going to London, and you travel at Mach 1.5, you’ll get to London after everyone has already closed up shop. Then you still lose the day. With Mach 2.2, you make it there in time for an afternoon meeting, even including ground transportation. That’s really important. If you look at an airline schedule about what trips passengers can take, Mach 1.5 isn’t good enough in most cases. You have to go at least Mach 2. And my belief is that 50 years after Concorde, we need to be faster, not slower. There is a huge need to fly this fast, the other proposed lower-speed concepts will run into some real challenges when you look what you can actually do with them.

Q: Critics say your aircraft will be too big to be viable. True?

Scholl: I rather think it’ll be too small. This works on hundreds of routes that have enough premium traffic for it. We’ve already announced 76 aircraft reserved by five airlines, and this is just scratching the surface, this is going to be a huge market. We are on track to hit this 1,300 sales forecast just for our Boom aircraft alone over ten years. This is supported by a third-party analysis made by the Boyd Group. And I think there is a good chance we’ll beat that. History shows that when flights get faster, people travel more often. It happened when jets replaced propeller aircraft, traffic grew like six-fold. When you can get from London to New York in 3:15 hours instead of seven hours, a lot more people will go. Which means you will see a big increase in demand. So in light of that, this aircraft might be way too small.

Q: What do you expect to be your first supersonic flight as a passenger to be like?

Scholl: It’s gonna be awesome, I can’t wait to see the curvature of the earth for myself from 60,000 feet through our big windows. It’s going to open the eyes of the world to a faster future.

www.boomsupersonic.com

The public battering United Airlines suffered over its treatment of a 69-year-old doctor has not translated to its bottom line with the carrier on Tuesday reporting a strong increase in second-quarter net profit to $US881 million.

The result, up 39 per cent compared to last year, came as revenue rose 6.4 per cent to $US10 billion, passenger revenue per available seat mile rose 2.1 per cent and consolidated yield increased 2 per cent in what president Scott Kirby described as “an outstanding quarter”.

Calls for a boycott of the airline after Dr David Dao was dragged screaming from his seat on April 9 went unheeded with the airline reporting a 5 per cent rise in passenger numbers over the three months to June 30 to 38.25 million.The increase on mainline services was even higher at 9.5 per cent.

Read: United satisfaction ratings may survive furor.

Th results prompted chief executive Oscar Munoz to observe the results demonstrated “United is firmly on the right path’’.

“From investing in our products and our people, redoubling our focus on the customer experience, closing the margin gap with our peers and delivering strong returns to our investors, we have made important progress and moved United decisively forward,’’ Munoz said in the results announcement.

“No single quarter constitutes a trend and we still have much further to go before we fully realize the potential of this airline and exceed the expectations of our customers.

“But, we also know that one success begets another and the strong financial and operating performance we posted this quarter adds to the momentum that all of us here at United are determined to build upon."

United started the quarter in crisis mode after Dao incident prompted a global backlash that resulted in a mea culpa by Munoz and the introduction of changes to the way the airline operated.

These included increased customer compensation for voluntary denied boarding of up to $10,000 and a reduction in the level of overbooking that saw involuntary denied boardings in June down 88 per cent on the previous year.

The airline said it had implemented the majority of the 10 changes it announced to address the backlash.

It also pointed to improvements in its premium transcontinental services that included flat-bed seats in business class and complimentary meals and alcohol for passengers in Economy Plus.

Other pluses included improvements at Los Angeles International Airport and better ways to redeem frequent flyer rewards.

From an operational perspective, United said it delivered in the second quarter the best competition, on-time departure and performance in company history.

“As a result, United had fewer cancellations than any major competitor,’’ it said.