The Cintra Consortium, owner of Mexico’s major airlines, is sketching out the fusion of two of the country’s top carriers –Mexicana and Aeromexico- to sell the resulting company to the private sector as the two airlines keep on inching back in the black in a piecemeal fashion. The Cintra Consortium raked in $127 million during the third quarter of the ongoing year after taking a screaming $168 million nosedive in 2003.

Patricio Sepulveda, vice president of the International Air Transportation Agency (IATA) for Latin America and the Caribbean, warned airlines will lose as many as $5 billion this year as a result of spiking oil prices. "Even though it´s $5 billion in losses worldwide we´re talking about, we´re confident there´ll be $3 billion worth of profits by the end of the year," Mr. Sepulveda was quoted as saying during the 13th Assembly of Airport Councils (AC) that took place in Trinidad & Tobago.

Air France is now ready to raise airfares for mid-range and long-haul flights in an effort to offset additional spending the company has incurred in the face of galloping fuel prices. France´s flagship air carrier issued a press release to inform a 3 percent surcharge in plane tickets for long-haul flights and 2 percent for mid-range trips. The price raise affects flights departing from France.

Copa Airlines, the Panamanian carrier, announced the purchase of ten 90-seat E-Jets airplanes for $300 million from Brazilian company Embraer. The first two jetliners will get to Panama by the end of 2005, while the remaining eight planes will start trickling in from late 2005 through 2008.

American Airlines will start putting additional charges to some European and Latin American nations in which travel agents issue paper plane tickets for destinations where electronic tickets could be doled out instead, an action that’s being applied in the U.S. The surcharge for Mexico, the Caribbean and other Latin American countries will be fixed at $25. In Spain, Belgium and France, it’ll be €25 apiece.

Foreign tourists that visited Brazil from January to September this year shelled out over $2.3 billion, up a whopping 33.1 percent from the same period of time last year, the country´s Central Bank informed this week. According to the banking institution, foreign trippers in Brazil forked over some $220 million in September alone, an 8.2 percent increase compared to the same month a year before.