United Touts Eco-Friendly Flights and 7 Other Aviation Trends This Week

United Touts Environmental Impact From Eco-Friendly Flights: While last week’s eco-friendly flight was as much marketing as it was real innovation, United is still leading the way toward environmentally friendlier skies.

Airlines May Have a Tougher Road to Reducing Plastics Than Hotels: It’s easy to say that travel companies should ditch plastics to help save the environment, but this will be much harder for airlines than some other sectors.

Star Alliance Gets a New Partner in Asia: Provisional partners are all the rage in the airline alliance community. Fiji last year joined Oneworld as an interim partner. Now, Thai Smiles is doing the same with the Star Alliance.

Airlines Reluctantly Adapt to Reimbursing Travelers for Flight Disruptions: TUI Fly says it’s the first airline to work with tech vendors to automate and standardize the process of flight disruption claims. Larger carriers, take note: You also need to reduce your enormous backlogs of consumer claims, whether you build tech in-house or find a vendor.

Scandinavian Airlines Goes Local With Farm-to-Tray-Table Menus: For long-haul flights SAS lacks the size and scale to compete with its much larger European competitors. On short-haul routes the airline can’t compete with the cost structure of the continent’s strongest low-cost-carriers. But there’s one place it probably does have an edge: its onboard food.

Travel Managers Express Concerns About Boeing 737 Max Safety: Travel managers are concerned for the safety of travelers who will be flying Boeing 737 Max series aircraft in the future, and with good reason.

Boeing’s Formula to Compete With Airbus Following Boeing 737 Max Disaster: Developing an all-new jet takes a decade and costs a fortune. And no one knows what the market will be for planes in the future. Understandably, Boeing is moving slowly. But if the company wants to keep its standing relative to Airbus, it should probably make some new technology airplanes.

Uncertainty Looms Over Boeing and Airbus Ahead of Paris Air Show: Over the past decade, global airlines have committed to a lot of airplanes. Perhaps too many. Is it possible the bubble might burst soon?