Flyers, who had booked flights via Paytm, will receive the refund in their airline credit shell. They can redeem that refund amount in order to book a flight ticket via Paytm website and mobile site.

The airline may make further changes in compliance with regulatory guidelines once they are finalized and notified, Vistara said in a statement.

Coronavirus Lockdown: The third round of lockdown has come with detailed rules for green, orange and red zones and has allowed some services to open in each zone with specific guidelines.

Suspension of flight operations has been extended till May 17, the Director General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) said in a circular issued today.

India will send flights to several countries between May 7 and 13. Among the countries, India is likely to send 10 flights to the UAE, seven flights each to the US, and the UK. Apart from these, India will send five to Saudi Arabia, five to Singapore, and two flights to Qatar

The operation of two flights from Qatar to Kerala is a part of Modi's government's mega mission to evacuate close to 15,000 Indians stranded in 12 countries between May 7 and May 13.

Good work team!' is how External Affairs Minister Dr. S. Jaishankar termed India's biggest evacuation exercise on Thursday.

The tech entrepreneur's company will launch a Falcon 9 rocket to transport NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley in a first for the space agency as it looks to cut costs.

A test run in December was ended early when the spacecraft failed to engage its thrusters on time.

The passengers were subjected to thermal test at the aerobridge itself before allowing them to undergo customs and immigration checks, Kozhikode airport sources said.

•Dassault Systèmes collaborated with SATS, Asia’s leading food solutions and gateway services provider, to boost operational efficiency, minimize food waste •Growth in airline passenger travel underscores need for sustainable excellence in aerospace industry-related commercial services •Digital twin experience with the 3DEXPERIENCE platform bridges the gap between the virtual and real for in-flight catering production

Sunbirds, a Toulouse-based startup has set up an office, assembly workshop and maintenance centre in Brisbane, Queensland. The office provides drone packages and drone-as-a-service solutions to surveyors, cattle stations and environmental monitoring companies. Australia is emerging as a hub for Agriculture 4.0 – the next generation of technologies set to revolutionise the agriculture and food sectors.

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Summary of the communication from the EU commissionInterpretative Guidelines on EU Regulation 261/2004 on passenger rights in the context of the developing situation with Covid-19 - 18 March 2020 Right to choose between reimbursement and rerouting ...

(MENAFN - IANS) Chennai, May 9 (IANS) Two Air India Express flights commanded by women took off on Saturday, to evacuate stranded Indians from foreig... ......

(MENAFN - Khaleej Times) As part of the Vande Bharat Mission, an Air India flight with around 200 Indians from Sharjah will take off for Lucknow today... ......

After suspending its passenger flights due to pandemic flight restrictions, Turkey's low-cost carrier Pegasus Airlines announced on May 7 it has started cargo flights.

MANILA: Manila’s international airport will allow international charter and commercial flights to resume arriving on designated days, beginning from Monday.

Since Mumbai native Alex Johnson’s work contract in Saudi Arabia ended more than a month ago, the former cashier in a restaurant has been surviving on one meal a day to make his funds last while waiting to return to India.The 35-year-old, who did not want to use his real name out of concerns there might be repercussions from his former employer, is desperate to see his two-year-old son.In Singapore, Ramya Rekha Chola who is 29 weeks pregnant needs to return to Kurnool in southern India at least…

ISLAMABAD: Special Assistant to the Prime Minister for Overseas Pakistanis Zulfi Bukhari announced Friday that Pakistan would sent its first flight on May 18, 2020 to repatriate students from Wuhan,...

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Over 50 flights are scheduled to return stranded Lebanese citizens in the third phase of citizen repatriation set to begin May 14, Middle East Airlines said in a statement Friday.

A verbal altercation took place on a crowded flight from London returning Lebanese expatriates to Beirut, as passengers were angered by the lack of distancing measures to prevent the spread of coronavirus, local media reported Saturday.

Arizona-based company World View Enterprises says it has taken a major step towards launching commercial balloon flights to the edge of space, with a successful unmanned test flight that reached an altitude of about 23 miles. The company hopes to begin taking tourists to near space in 2016 with advanced technology it says will open up a new view of the Earth. Sharon Reich reports.

Frustrated Southwest Airlines customers have been forced to wait in long lines for a second day as the airline tries to solve a technical problem with its electronic booking system. In the meantime, passengers are being told to prepare for delays. Katharine Jackson reports.

US Airways flight 1939 lands in Philadelphia, marking the last flight for the airline which merged with American Airlines. Katharine Jackson reports.

SpaceX’s first crewed launch is planned for 27 May and will be run from a mission control with desks set six feet apart to comply with social distancing protocols

Wael Salem, Benjamin Cellini, Mark A. Frye, and Jean-Michel Mongeau

Most animals shift gaze by a ‘fixate and saccade’ strategy, where the fixation phase stabilizes background motion. A logical prerequisite for robust detection and tracking of moving foreground objects, therefore, is to suppress the perception of background motion. In a virtual reality magnetic tether system enabling free yaw movement, Drosophila implemented a fixate and saccade strategy in the presence of a static panorama. When the spatial wavelength of a vertical grating was below the Nyquist wavelength of the compound eyes, flies drifted continuously­ and gaze could not be maintained at a single location. Because the drift occurs from a motionless stimulus—thus any perceived motion stimuli are generated by the fly itself—it is illusory, driven by perceptual aliasing. Notably, the drift speed was significantly faster than under a uniform panorama suggesting perceptual enhancement due to aliasing. Under the same visual conditions in a rigid tether paradigm, wing steering responses to the unresolvable static panorama were not distinguishable from a resolvable static pattern, suggesting visual aliasing is induced by ego motion. We hypothesized that obstructing the control of gaze fixation also disrupts detection and tracking of objects. Using the illusory motion stimulus, we show that magnetically tethered Drosophila track objects robustly in flight even when gaze is not fixated as flies continuously drift. Taken together, our study provides further support for parallel visual motion processing and reveals the critical influence of body motion on visuomotor processing. Motion illusions can reveal important shared principles of information processing across taxa.

Kelsey L. Jones, Rahmatollah Rajabzadeh, Guncha Ishangulyyeva, Nadir Erbilgin, and Maya L. Evenden

Flight polyphenisms naturally occur as discrete or continuous traits in insects. Discrete flight polyphenisms include winged and wingless morphs, whereas continuous flight polyphenisms can take the form of short- or long-distance fliers. The mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) exhibits polyphenic variation in flight distance but the consequences of this flight variation on life history strategies of beetles is unknown. This study assessed the effect of flight on two particular aspects of beetle biology: (1) an energetic trade-off between flight distance and host colonisation capacity; and (2) the relationship between flight distance and pheromone production. A 23-h flight treatment was applied to a subset of beetles using computer. After flight treatment, both flown and unflown (control) beetles were given the opportunity to colonise bolts of host trees, and beetles that entered hosts were aerated to collect pheromone. A trade-off occurred between initiation of host colonisation and percent body weight lost during flight, which indicates energy-use during flight affects host acceptance in female mountain pine beetles. Furthermore, production of the aggregation pheromone trans-verbenol by female beetles was influenced by both percent weight lost during flight and flight distance. Male production of exo-brevicomin was affected by beetle condition following flight but not by the energy used during flight. These novel results give new insight into the polyphenic flight behaviour of mountain pine beetles. Flight variation is adaptive by acting to maintain population levels through safe and risky host colonisation strategies. These findings suggest mechanisms that facilitate the extremities of the continuous flight polyphenism spectrum. These opposing mechanisms appear to maintain the high variation in flight exhibited by this species.

David J. Pritchard and Mario Vallejo-Marin

Vibrations play an important role in insect behaviour. In bees, vibrations are used in a variety of contexts including communication, as a warning signal to deter predators and during pollen foraging. However, little is known about how the biomechanical properties of bee vibrations vary across multiple behaviours within a species. In this study, we compared the properties of vibrations produced by Bombus terrestris audax (Hymenoptera: Apidae) workers in three contexts: during flight, during defensive buzzing, and in floral vibrations produced during pollen foraging on two buzz-pollinated plants (Solanum, Solanaceae). Using laser vibrometry, we were able to obtain contactless measures of both the frequency and amplitude of the thoracic vibrations of bees across the three behaviours. Despite all three types of vibrations being produced by the same power flight muscles, we found clear differences in the mechanical properties of the vibrations produced in different contexts. Both floral and defensive buzzes had higher frequency and amplitude velocity, acceleration, and displacement than the vibrations produced during flight. Floral vibrations had the highest frequency, amplitude velocity and acceleration of all the behaviours studied. Vibration amplitude, and in particular acceleration, of floral vibrations has been suggested as the key property for removing pollen from buzz-pollinated anthers. By increasing frequency and amplitude velocity and acceleration of their vibrations during vibratory pollen collection, foraging bees may be able to maximise pollen removal from flowers, although their foraging decisions are likely to be influenced by the presumably high cost of producing floral vibrations.

Shih-Jung Hsu and Bo Cheng

In the presence of wind or background image motion, flies are able to maintain a constant retinal slip velocity via regulating flight speed to the extent permitted by their locomotor capacity. Here we investigated the retinal slip compensation of tethered blue-bottle flies (Calliphora vomitoria) flying semi-freely along an annular corridor in a magnetically levitated flight mill enclosed by two motorized cylindrical walls. We perturbed the flies’ retinal slip via spinning the cylindrical walls, generating bilaterally averaged retinal slip perturbations from -0.3 to 0.3 m·s^–1 (or -116.4 to 116.4 deg.·s^–1) When the perturbation was less than ~0.1 m·s^–1 (38.4 deg.·s^–1), the flies successfully compensated the perturbations and maintained a retinal slip velocity by adjusting their airspeed up to 20%. However, with greater retinal slip perturbation, the flies’ compensation became saturated, as the flies’ airspeed plateaued, indicating that they were unable to further maintain a constant retinal slip velocity. The compensation gain, i.e., the ratio of airspeed compensation and retinal slip perturbation, depended on the spatial frequency of the grating patterns, being the largest at 12 m^–1 (0.04 deg.^–1).

Spending at least six months in microgravity can cause astronauts’ brain volumes to increase, causing pressure to build up in their heads and creating vision problems

SpaceX’s first crewed launch is planned for 27 May and will be run from a mission control with desks set six feet apart to comply with social distancing protocols

For the first time, NASA's Astrobee robot has demonstrated autonomous free flight in space

New Dlehi, May 09: Several Indians, who are stranded in at least seven countries due to coronavirus outbreak, is all set to fly back to their home country on Saturday in special flights under Vande Bharat Mission. According to officials,

Noida Police Commissioner has written to national carrier Air India, requesting the airline to ensure that pilots and crew involved in repatriation flights should stay back in Delhi.

The stranded people hail from Tamil Nadu and they were working in the United Arab Emirates.

New Delhi, May 09 (ANI): An Air India flight carrying 129 passengers from Dhaka, Bangladesh has landed at Delhi airport. The stranded Indian nationals are being brought back to the country through government’s initiative, ‘Vande Bharat Mission’.

Around 250 Indian students and tourists were seen queuing with their luggage at the airport as they prepared for the journey home.

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A pilot has sparked complaints over an alleged breach of lockdown rules after spelling out "NHS" using his plane's flightpath.

Airlines should be able to issue vouchers instead of cash refunds for cancelled flights, according to 12 EU member states who have requested a change in the rules to help carriers.

Commercial space trips are a step closer to becoming reality after Virgin Galactic's spaceship took a glide and landed safely in the New Mexico desert.