Dragonair rebrands, while Cathay alters expansion plans and suffers delivery delays

The Cathay Pacific Group has announced it will rebrand its Dragonair airline, while reports circulate that the delivery of its new A350s will be delayed and it is scaling back expansion plans.
This morning, the Hong Kong-headquartered company announced that it would rebrand Dragonair as Cathay Dragon.
“By more closely aligning the two brands, this rebranding will capitalise on Cathay Pacific’s high international brand recognition and leverage on Cathay Dragon’s unique connectivity into mainland China,” the company said.
The rebranding will see a new livery created for Cathay Dragon that features a Cathay-style brushwing logo.
This livery will appear for the first time on one of Cathay Dragon’s Airbus A330-300 aircraft in April and will be progressively introduced to the rest of the airline’s fleet.
The two will remain as separate airlines, operating under their own licences.
Meanwhile, news agency Reuters reported yesterday that delivery of Cathay’s new widebody A350 aircraft will be delayed slightly.
It was due to receive the first of the 12 aircraft by February, but it will now receive them closer to the end of the first half of the year due to delays from some parts suppliers.
As well as the delays, the airline is also reportedly scaling back expansion plans because of a year-long work to rule action from cockpit crew and in order to improve in-time performance by adding more slack into the system.
The South China Morning Post reports that the introduction of daily flights to Manchester and Boston have been delayed until next year while a new flight to Gatwick has been moved back until September.
The work-to-rule action was launched by the Hong Kong Aircrew Officers Association in December 2014 in relation to a pay dispute.
Last year, Cathay and Drangonair handled 10.6bn CMTK, an increase of 5.4% compared with its performance during the previous year.