Air Canada and Australia's leading carrier, Qantas, will both reduce flights over the next two months to Taiwan because they say they cannot make enough money from them.

Canada's new low fare airline, Calgary based Zip, (owned by Air Canada) took to the skies in September, launching short haul domestic routes in the west of the country, flying initial services between Edmonton, Vancouver, Winnipeg and Calgary.

Rumours abound in Oz that Singapore Airlines may revive Australia’s failed domestic operator, Ansett. Sir Richard Branson’s Oz based Virgin Blue (been going 2 years now) picked up much of Ansett’s business when it went bust.

Talking of Virgin Blue, they have applied for permission to fly to Hong Kong and are pursuing plans to start flights to New Zealand, and possibly Bali.

Still in Australia, Australian, Australia’s newest low fare operation, (owned by Qantas), is to start services to Japan next month from Cairns. The first two routes will be to Nagoya and Osaka and it plans to be serving six Asian destinations with its four aircraft before the end of the year. (A good bit of competition may provide us Globetrotters with more routings and lower costs!)

Cathay Pacific have announced plans to resume flying to mainland China. They have applied for routes to Beijing, Shanghai and Xiamen but has not said when it is likely to start services. The only Hong Kong airline currently serving China is Dragonair, in which Cathay has an 18 percent stake.

Boo hoo! US Airways have announced that they will no longer be serving free alcoholic drinks on their transatlantic flights to economy class passengers.

Delta Air Lines is cancelling its daily non-stop flights from its Atlanta hub to both Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro due to losses made on these 2 routes.

BAA, the world's largest airport operator, reported a rise in traffic at its seven UK airports, and says that it has won the backing of local planning authorities to raise passenger capacity at London Stansted to 25 million.

A GBP£250 million (USD$391 million) scheme aims to make Stansted, one of the country's fastest growing airports, capable of handling an extra 10 million passengers by 2010.