Investigators have traced last month's dramatic in-flight window loss on a Ryanair Group jet to a fatigue-cracked engine fan blade, in a finding that revives uncomfortable echoes of a fatal 2018 accident and raises questions over why a mandated safety fix will not be compulsory across Europe's most common airliner until 2028. The US National Transportation Safety Board, to which Greece handed the inquiry under international rules, said in a preliminary report that blade numbe

Mitsubishi Electric has agreed to take full ownership of Medcom, one of Europe's leading manufacturers of power electronics for rail vehicles, in a deal that tightens Japanese control over a strategic node of the continent's rolling-stock supply chain and signals foreign confidence in what the buyer calls the world's largest rail market. The Japanese group announced on 7 August that it would acquire the remaining 51 per cent stake in the Warsaw-based company through its wholl

Gerry McGovern, the designer behind the reborn Land Rover Defender and a generation of Range Rovers, has said his career in car design is far from over, in his first public comments since his sudden and contested departure from Jaguar Land Rover, and a signal that one of the industry's most influential figures intends to return to the drawing board. Speaking exclusively to Autocar's My Week in Car podcast, published on 12 August, McGovern set out to correct the record on an e

Ukraine has stopped its drone campaign against oil tankers in the Black Sea after direct intervention from Washington, in a de-escalation that promises to relieve the freight and insurance squeeze that had driven tanker rates on the crucial Kazakh export route to Gulf-crisis levels. The Financial Times reported on 12 August that Ukraine halted the strikes following a request from US Vice-President J.D. Vance, who telephoned President Volodymyr Zelensky on 31 July as a series

Latvia's flag carrier airBaltic has torn up a decade of expansion ambition, unveiling a restructuring plan that cuts its Airbus A220 fleet by a third and seeks €225 million in emergency financing, in one of the starkest illustrations yet of how the fuel shock from the Iran conflict has exposed structural weakness at Europe's smaller airlines. The plan, approved by the airline's supervisory board and made public on 11 August, will reduce the all-Airbus A220-300 fleet from 54 a

Germany has launched a funding scheme to equip rolling stock with the European Train Control System, releasing money from a €1.7 billion programme aimed at the vehicle side of a signalling upgrade that Brussels regards as one of the largest industrial projects in the continent's history. The onboard funding line, opened this week, targets the ETCS units that trains must carry to run on digitally signalled track, complementing the far larger sums Germany is pouring into tracks

The British government has announced almost £130 million of investment in next-generation vehicle technology, backing Bentley, Nissan and a raft of smaller firms, in a bid to arrest a steep decline in domestic car production and reindustrialise the country's manufacturing heartlands. Delivered through the £4 billion DRIVE35 programme, described by ministers as the largest state investment in the UK car industry since the post-war era, the funding will support more than 1,800

The Black Sea has become the latest strategic chokepoint straining global energy flows, as an intensifying campaign of drone strikes on tankers loading Russian and Kazakh crude drives freight rates to Middle East levels and pushes war-risk premiums sharply higher. Repeated attacks on vessels at the Caspian Pipeline Consortium terminal near Novorossiysk have more than doubled tanker rates since June to around $400,000 a day, according to Seatrade Maritime. The Baltic Exchange'

Air France-KLM is positioning itself for the most acquisitive phase in its recent history, with a decision on its bid for TAP Air Portugal expected within weeks and its takeover of Scandinavian carrier SAS due to complete before year-end, in a twin push that would extend the Franco-Dutch group's reach from the Nordics to the South Atlantic. The nearer-term prize is TAP. Lisbon is expected to choose between Air France-KLM and Lufthansa in early September, having received bindi

Italy's state railway has placed a firm order for 19 high-speed trains to serve a planned Paris to London route, its first concrete rolling-stock commitment to the Channel Tunnel corridor and a decisive step toward ending the monopoly Eurostar has held since services began in 1994. FS Italiane, through its French subsidiary Trenitalia France, signed the agreement with Hitachi Rail on 7 August as part of an investment of around €2 billion covering construction, long-term maint