BUSINESS BRIEFS
Business Briefs: Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Published: July 15, 2008

WASHINGTON — The Federal Aviation Administration is studying whether to again change takeoff and landing procedures at John F. Kennedy International Airport after a second near-collision of aircraft in less than a week.

At a news conference Monday, acting FAA Administrator Robert Sturgell said a change ordered Friday for the New York airport might not be permanent.

"Given that we had two in this short a time frame, we're going to take a look at the procedure, we're going to see if there are additional considerations we should add to the procedure, and in the meantime the airport will be using a different configuration,” Sturgell said.

DALLAS — High fuel prices and slowing demand for travel have raised the risk that airlines could default on aircraft leases, Fitch Ratings said Monday.

Fitch revised its outlook for the industry to negative, saying downgrades are likely to outnumber upgrades over the next year.

The ratings agency said fuel costs and waning demand could pressure the airlines to write down the values of their planes. Fitch revised its asset-performance outlook for aircraft securitizations to declining and said downgrades were most likely to cover older, less fuel-efficient aircraft.

This month, the parent of American Airlines — AMR Corp. — did just that. AMR said it will take a charge of $1.1 billion to $1.2 billion in the second quarter to cover the lower value of its MD-80 and Embraer RJ-135 fleets. The MD-80s are heavy fuel burners.

Friday, Continental Airlines Inc. said it would take a noncash charge of about $51 million to write down the value of Boeing 737 fleets, and it warned of more write-downs in the third quarter. Jet fuel prices have risen more than 50 percent this year.

JUNEAU, Alaska — Alaska's North Slope oil production received a slight boost.

Houston-based ConocoPhillips on Monday said it began producing oil at the Qannik field two months ahead of schedule.

By next year it will reach peak production of about 4,000 barrels of oil per day. With oil prices inching toward $150 a barrel, any production is considered helpful.

But that represents about one-half of 1 percent of the 730,000 barrels of oil that flows from the North Slope down the 800-mile trans-Alaskan pipeline.

The field is a joint venture between the field's operator ConocoPhillips (78 percent) and Anadarko Petroleum (22 percent).

HONOLULU — With sugar cane and pineapples fading, Hawaii's next big export to the U.S. mainland could be less sweet — 100,000 tons of trash a year.

In one of the most ambitious municipal disposal plans yet, Oahu, Hawaii's most populous island, is looking to send some of its garbage on a 2,600-mile voyage to the West Coast. With 900,000 residents and close to five times as many tourists each year, Oahu is running out of landfill space. And neighbors on other Hawaiian islands say they have enough garbage of their own.

LOS ANGELES — Microsoft's Xbox 360 video game console will be able to stream thousands of movies over the Internet, thanks to a deal with Netflix.

The arrangement Microsoft Corp. announced Monday at the E3 Media & Business Summit in Los Angeles will give Netflix's 8 million subscribers another way to stream movies on a TV instead of a computer. A Netflix-backed startup called Roku sells a small streaming device that connects to TVs.

The Netflix streaming service , which operates in addition to its DVD-by-mail program, offers 10,000 movies and TV shows. Microsoft's Xbox had movies available before, but not nearly as many.

WASHINGTON — Federal prosecutors allege that Indian generic drugmaker Ranbaxy Laboratories deliberately misled the U.S. government about the quality of its low-cost medicines.

The Justice Department is demanding Ranbaxy turn over documents which it hopes will prove the company fabricated data to convince the U.S. government to approve its products.

Prosecutors made the allegations in a motion filed July 3 with the U.S. District Court of Maryland. The filing asks the court to order Ranbaxy to turn over the documents.

Ranbaxy called the allegations "baseless,” in a statement Monday, but said it would cooperate with the investigation.

Ranbaxy is India's largest pharmaceutical company and claims to be the 10th largest generic drugmaker in the world.

The Associated Press

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