Berlin - A German union seeking pay rises for Berlin airport staff vowed to disrupt operations at two capital-city airports, with workers to walk off the job for three and a half hours on Tuesday.

Officials said Monday that in the period to be affected, after 6 am Tuesday, 50 takeoffs and 30 landings were timetabled at Tegel Airport and 20 takeoffs and nine landings were scheduled at Schoenefeld Airport.

Amman - A senior official of the International Air Traffic Association (IATA) on Sunday predicted that 2009 would be a difficult year for the global air traffic industry due to the deepening world economic crisis.

The revenues of the world's airlines are expected to go down by 5- 6 per cent, while the passengers traffic and cargo are expected to drop by 3 and 5 per cent respectively, Majdi Sabri, IATA's Vice President for the Middle East and North Africa, told Jordan's official Petra news agency.

Today a warning was extended to private airlines, which are hiking their airfares by forming cartels, by Union Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel who announced that strict action would be taken against those indulging in such activities.

Mr. Patel said, "As far as raising airfares is concerned, they are outside the domain of the government as airfares are fixed by market forces."

Hamburg  - British entrepreneur Richard Branson has told a German magazine he will test-fly a joy-riding spacecraft this year.

Branson's company, Virgin Galactic, plans to take passengers to the verge of space, though not high enough to achieve earth orbit. The tourists will experience weightlessness for several minutes.

The take-offs are expected to be from the US state of New Mexico.

Jakarta  - Thick smoke caused by forest fires blanketing Indonesia's Riau province on Sumatra island forced the brief closure of the local airport on Tuesday, an official said.

Five flights were diverted to airports in neighboring provinces after the haze reduced visibility to below 1 kilometre on Tuesday morning, said Dedi Suryana, chief of the Sultan Syarif Kasim airport in Pekanbaru, the provincial capital.

"There were some delays in departures and arrivals but we have reopened now," he said.

Wellington  - Australia's Qantas Airways will hand over domestic services in New Zealand to its budget subsidiary Jetstar in June, the company announced Tuesday.

Jetstar will operate 84 weekly return services between Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and the South Island lake and ski resort town Queenstown on Airbus A320 jets

A statement said that passengers already booked on Qantas flights within New Zealand after that date would be switched to Jetstar services.