Flights Direct

The Airport hotel group Arora is about to buy a new portfolio of commercial properties from the UK airport operator BAA for £265 million.

Arora hotels was started by the hotel tycoon Surinder Arora, who arrived in the UK at the age of 13, and began his working life a customer service agent for British Airways.

In 2006 alone, Arora bought nine airport hotels from BAA in a exchange worth around £300 million. Arora Holdings is now thought to be the largest family-owned hotel group within the UK, and they are in the process of building a hotel for Heathrow’s new terminal 5.

BAA’s own properties include airport offices and warehouses, was last year valued at £1.1 billion last year. The down-side to these financial markets is that they have been hit just as hard as house prices, which has made it difficult for BAA to find a buyer.

Arora is now buying 33 of the 58 property sites that are owned by Airport Property Partnership (APP), which is the process of a joint cohesion between BAA and Morley Fund Management. The majority of these properties are within Heathrow Airport.

BAA is continually looking for buyers for its airport properties, which mostly consists of industrial buildings such as land and warehouses. This is in an attempt by BAA to gain more money from its airports, as they struggle for cash. Earlier this month BAA sold over is World Duty Free shops to the Italian group Autogrill for £546 million.

Wales is not a huge international destination, and as its stands, business people will travel internationally via another airport such as Heathrow or Gatwick. Although, this may change, as Patrick Duffy who is the new managing director of Cardiff Airport states that this will not be the case for much longer.

Duffy who was speaking to the Western Mail, recently commented that ‘Cardiff Airport has an opportunity to enhance its contribution to the economic and social well-being of the nation. There are ways we can look to do that – for example do we define ourselves as a regional airport in the UK, or a national airport in Wales? Can we be better connected with other capital cities in the world? Of course we can. In strict classification terms, we are just one of many regional airports around the UK. But spiritually we need to adopt more of a national outlook.’

However, this type of expansion to Cardiff will be determined by their new marketing campaign, which has been launched online at www.youwouldifyoucould.co.uk, which will attempt to find out how high the demand for an International Airport in Cardiff actually is.

The Australian airline Qantas is currently installing the latest technology within all of its domestic planes. This technology will mean that all passengers will be able to send and receive emails and SMS messages via a mobile phone or other electronic devices.

This news has been released shortly after the first mobile phone call was made on an Emirates flight last week. Qantas will be using the same technology as Emirates, which has been developed by AeroMobile.

Qantas first trialed this new mobile technology in Boeing 767-300 plane, between April 2007 and January 2008. “The evaluation of this new technology was a great success. An overwhelming majority of passengers involved in the evaluation indicated they wanted access to inflight connectivity on an ongoing basis,” states the Qantas executive general manager, John Borghetti.

AeroMobile has been able to develop this new technology, which means that passengers can use mobile phones and other electronic devices can be used safely during flight without interfering with the aircraft systems or with the communication network on the ground.

“Customers wanting to send or receive an SMS will require only a GSM phone and a global roaming account, while customers wanting to send or receive emails will need a GPRS enabled device like a Blackberry or an appropriately equipped laptop,” Borghetti added.

Qantas will not initially be allowing passengers to make voice calls on their mobiles. “Voice connectivity is a feature of the technology but will not be activated as part of the new service,” the airline said in part of its statement.

The AeroMobile technology will initially be installed on the Boeing 767-300 and Airbus A330-200 aircraft that are operated within Australia.

Flights to the moon may be available privately to everyone ‘by the end of the 2020s’, a NASA official was heard saying in London yesterday.

Peter Worden, the director of the NASA Ames Research Station in California was yesterday speaking to a group of physics students and faculty at the University of Western Ontario, commented that NASA is reaching its targets to return people to the moon by 2020, which would be the first people up there since 1972.

However, it might not be NASA who are the first ones who reach the moon on a visit. There are around 20 wealthy individuals, as well as companies, from all over the worlds who are expressing an interest in taking their own space flights. “I think (private interests) are going to beat us to the lunar surface,” Worden commented.

These private fliers would not just be astronomy buffs, “it’s NASA’s unstated policy that the moon is available for economic activity,” Worden stated, when answering a question about the legal frontier of space.

It looks quite likely that there will be room for regular people, and not just scientists and astronauts, for trips to the moon. As the ideas of these commercial flights move forward, Worden predicted. “We think we’re at the verge of really interesting private efforts to move forward.”