The Star Alliance carrier says its subsidiary Zeal 320 has reached an agreement with the Engineering, Printing & Manufacturing Union that represents the A320 cabin crew that work for Zeal 320.

Zeal 320 is a company that employs many of the ANZ A320 cabin crew. These cabin attendants had been lobbying for their wages and conditions to be on par with A320 cabin crew employed directly by the airline.

A new collective employment agreement has been agreed to, says ANZ, which declines to comment further.

The national carrier says a new collective agreement is being presented to flight attendants for ratification.

The cabin crew is employed by the airline’s subsidiary, Zeal 320. Workers argued they were paid less than crew working for Air New Zealand.

The sometimes bitter dispute has dragged on since October last year and involved staff taking industrial action.

In an attention-grabbing stunt, 10 cabin crew were suspended for wearing feather boas, lace gloves and pink wigs on flights – which is against the company dress code.

Details of the agreement is not known and neither side is talking until the ratification process finishes at the end of next week.

The airline said the global recession had hit air travel hard and it has been cutting jobs and capacity to cope with lower passenger numbers.

“This result positions Air New Zealand as one of the top airline performers globally but it falls short of delivering shareholders an appropriate commercial return,” Chairman John Palmer said in a statement.

The airline said normalised profit before tax fell 26 percent to NZ$145 million, with losses on fuel hedging being partially offset by gains from foreign exchange movements.

Air New Zealand posted a net profit of NZ$21 million ($14.3 million) for the year ended June 30, compared with NZ$218 million last year.

The company declared an unchanged final dividend of 3.5 cents per share.

Air NZ shares, 77 percent owned by the New Zealand government, closed on Wednesday at NZ$1.25. So far this year the stock has risen around 32 percent, compared with a near 14 percent gain in the benchmark NZSX-50 index .NZ50.

The airline dominates the domestic markets, where it competes on main routes with Australian airlines Virgin Blue (VBA.AX) and Qantas Airways Ltd’s (QAN.AX) low cost offshoot Jetstar.

Over the year passenger demand fell 7.6 percent, but also reduced the amount flown — seat kilometres — by 7.2 percent.

Last week, Qantas reported its annual profit falling 88 percent as it fell into a loss in the second half, although it said there were early signs of a pick-up. [ID:nSYD352340] ($1=NZ$1.47) (Reporting by Adrian Bathgate)

In an unusual twist to the investigation of the November 27 crash of an Air New Zealand A320 near Perpignan, France, German airline officials have refused to release any details identifying the XL Airways pilots reportedly flying the plane.

Unlike most accident investigations that receive candor and cooperation from those involved, certain aspects of this investigation are being hampered by XL Airways policy against divulging information about its pilots.

Asger Schubert, XL Airways spokesman, told reporters from New Zealand’s Sunday Star-Times it is against the company policy of all German airlines to release personal information about employees.

Schubert stated that although he was impressed with the way New Zealand media had reported the crash and provided victims’ personal information, it was not the way things are done in Germany, the Star-Times said.

By contrast, Air New Zealand divulged information about employees involved in the incident without hesitation, and has continued to be open with the news media about any progress in the accident investigation.

As ANN reported, what was to have been a routine flight turned tragic as the A320 was on approach to Perpignan, France, when the plane suddenly dove into the Mediterranean Sea. The plane was bound for Frankfurt on a ferry flight operated by XL Airways.

“I could see it was an airliner because I saw two large engines. There was no fire, nothing,” a local policeman who witnessed the crash told France Info radio. “It was flying straight, then it turned brutally towards the ground. I said to myself it will never pull out and there was a big spray of water.”

The crash, off the Mediterranean coast of France on Friday (NZT), claimed seven lives – four Air New Zealand staff, a Civil Aviation Authority inspector and two German pilots.

Today the airline said the two black boxes recovered from the site had been so badly damaged they had to be sent to the manufacturers in North America to see if they could reveal any clues as to what caused the crash.

Air NZ group general manager international, Ed Sims, said so far 14 family members and friends of the victims were in France and seven more would arrive tomorrow (NZT).

“All the family and friends are being supported by representatives of the airline’s highly trained special assistance team,” he said.

“Everyone will be staying in the same hotel and (Air NZ) chief executive officer Rob Fyfe is personally meeting with them all and we are providing them with the latest information as it comes in from search teams,” Mr Sims said.

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Divers had recovered a cockpit voice recorder and a flight data recorder, which investigators were hoping would reveal the cause of the crash.

However, both had been badly damaged and would be sent to manufacturer Honeywell in North America to determine what data could be extracted from them, Mr Sims said.

Divers had also located the cockpit and found a third body nearby.

Two bodies were found last week and French authorities had made it clear they intended to continue the search and recovery operation until all bodies were found, he said.

“We cannot speak highly enough of the French authorities and the efforts they are putting into this operation,” Mr Sims said.

He said the Air NZ team in Perpignan included representatives from the airline’s emergency response team, security, operational safety, A320 fleet and communications divisions. There were also New Zealand police officers, and representatives of the New Zealand Airline Pilots Association and the Transport Accident Investigation Commission.

Mr Sims said the airline’s operations staff were world leaders in their fields and were on hand to provide specialist technical support to French authorities if required during the investigation.

Today at 2pm local time (2am NZ time) the airline held a service on the beach and at the crash site, Mr Sims said.

On the beach Mr Fyfe spoke about the great work the men who died had done and flight service managers and cabin crew performed a karakia as a “personal gesture to the New Zealand families”.

The family were then taken in two boats on a 20-minute journey to the crash site, where flowers and wreaths were placed and scattered.

Air New Zealand pilot Captain Brian Horrell, 52, and engineers Murray White, 37, Michael Gyles, 49, and Noel Marsh, 35 and as well as Civil Aviation Authority official Jeremy Cook, 58, were killed in the crash.

The plane was being flown by two German pilots from XL Airlines. The airline, which had leased the Airbus from Air NZ, said their names would not be released.

The plane was due to be returned to Air NZ.

French authorities have formally opened an investigation for “involuntary homicide”.

Mr Sims said that over the coming days Air NZ would only be able to release limited information on the search as the formal investigative process was underway.

“This will see our ability to communicate developments increasingly constrained under local law,” he said.

The pilots’ airline, XL Airways, has refused to reveal any details about the men and attempts by German newspapers to establish their identity have failed although there was an unconfirmed report that one of the Germans killed was a 58-year-old from Pfalzfeld.

“All we know is that they are German. We know nothing else,” a reporter from Bild, one of Germany’s best-selling newspapers, told the Sunday Star-Times.

Unlike Air New Zealand, which released details of its staff involved in the tragedy almost immediately and has kept media abreast of developments in the air crash investigation, XL Airways has kept any information it has to itself.

It leased the downed A320 plane from Air New Zealand two years ago and was in the process of handing it back when it crashed into the Mediterranean on final approach to Perpignan Airport.

When approached by the Star-Times for information about the pilots, XL Airways spokesman Asger Schubert said it was against company policy – and indeed the policy of all German airlines – to reveal any details.

Schubert said he was impressed with the way New Zealand media had covered the crash and provided personal insights into the victims but that was not the way things were done in Germany, where a harsher moral culture had developed in recent years. There was now a “feeling of distance for affected individuals”.

XL’s safety record was called into question by European media in October when one of its Boeing 737s, flying from Frankfurt to Antalya in Turkey was forced to make an emergency landing in Belgrade because of an engine problem. Serbian newspapers said witnesses spoke of 4m flames leaping from an engine but the airline refuted the reports.

German media have speculated the Air New Zealand plane’s de-icing gear might have failed causing it to nose-dive into the sea but the official investigation into the crash has yet to establish why the four-year-old aircraft crashed on what should have been a routine “acceptance” flight.

The world-first biofuel flight will now take place in early January next year.

The two hour 747-400 flight from Auckland had planned to use a jatropha-based fuel, sourced from seeds grown on environmentally sustainable farms.

“The full efforts and resources of Air New Zealand will be focused over the coming days on providing support to the family members of the missing New Zealanders and to our people, and assisting in the investigation of the A320 accident in France,” Air New Zealand says.

French authorities have recovered the cockpit voice recorder from the A320 aircraft that crashed into the sea on Friday morning (NZ time).

The plane had been leased from Air New Zealand by XL Airways Germany, which was operating it at the time of the crash.

The flight was to check that the aircraft, which had been repainted in Air New Zealand livery, was operating smoothly before Air New Zealand took the plane back and returned it to service.

Seven people died and it is not yet known what caused the accident.

The plane went down after an hour-long flight as it was approaching the airport at the city of Perpignan, and there was no radio correspondence between the pilots and air traffic control about any problems on board.

The incident was the 10th fatal accident involving the A320 aircraft.

The A320, first delivered in 1988, is one of the world’s most popular and respected aircraft.

It was the first commercial aircraft to use digital fly-by-wire flight control systems, and 3652 planes in the A320 family (which includes several other variants) have been built.

Of those, 19 have been involved in “hull loss accidents” – where the plane is completely destroyed or so badly damaged that it has to be written off – and these incidents have resulted in 631 fatalities.

The worst crash occurred last July, when a TAM Airlines flight was not able to stop while landing at an airport in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

All 187 passengers and crew died, as well as 12 people on the ground.
Brazilian and international authorities are still investigating the accident.

The families are staying in Perpignan, the town closest to where the A320 crashed into the Mediterranean Sea, killing five New Zealanders and two German pilots on Friday.

Tributes to the victims have been flowing in Auckland, with bouquets of flowers and cards laid outside Air New Zealand’s offices in the central city.

Just three bodies have been recovered from the aircraft’s ruins, which lie in pieces, 40m deep.

Divers have been struggling with a difficult rescue, with much of the wreckage in 30cm-deep mud and bad weather hampering their efforts.

Some family members have been taken to the crash site by boat to pay their respects to their loved ones.

The investigation into what caused the crash is expected to take months or years but it is hoped that some answers will be given much sooner, with information on one of two black boxes recovered from the wreck expected to be known within days.

It is hoped that the black box, which was said to be damaged, holds records of the final cockpit conversations and the sound of any warning alarms.

The Jetstream aircraft was traveling from the provincial town of Blenheim to Christchurch on New Zealand’s South Island when the emergency unfolded.

Police say the two pilots sent a distress call after being attacked in the cockpit by a knife-wielding passenger. None of the other passengers on the Air New Zealand flight was injured.

Authorities say a 33-year-old woman also claimed there were two bombs on board the aircraft. Bomb squad officers boarded the plane but found no explosives.

The woman was arrested when the plane touched down in Christchurch, one of New Zealand’s busiest airports.

Police inspector Dave Cliff says the injured pilots were taken to a hospital for treatment.

“One pilot received quite severe cuts to the hand and the second pilot received an injury to the foot,” he said. “It’s understood the injuries were caused by a knife.”

The suspect is being questioned in Christchurch. The motive for the alleged attack is still unclear. The woman lives in New Zealand, but is originally from Somalia.

Flights to and from Christchurch were suspended for more than two hours while the aircraft was searched. National carrier Air New Zealand has said it would review security procedures. Passengers taking domestic flights out of Blenheim airport are not subject to security checks, and hand luggage is not scanned.

The 19-seater Jetstream planes are used on short-haul regional flights by Air New Zealand and have only curtains separating the cockpit from travelers.

New Zealand, with a population of four million people, has never been targeted by a terrorist attack.