Level's growth will have to wait. The long-haul airline had planned a year of expansion to consolidate its position at Barcelona airport, once it began to operate as an independent airline within the IAG group at the end of 2025, but it has ended up implementing drastic cuts to its offer from June, a measure that, for the moment, distances itself from the risk of fuel shortage that concerns many companies in the sector due to the conflict in the Middle East and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

Level has just launched as an independent airline within the IAG group, which also includes Iberia, Vueling, British Airways, and Aer Lingus, after being created in 2017 as a commercial brand operated by Iberia. Rafael Jiménez Hoyos is in charge of piloting this new chapter for the low-cost carrier, which he joined at the end of 2014 with extensive experience in the aviation sector. Born in Albacete, his father worked as an aircraft mechanic, and he always knew he wanted to take to the skies in one of the planes he saw him working on. This led him to become a pilot, first in the military and then commercially. Trained at the General Air Academy in San Javier (Murcia), he eventually left the military to work for airlines such as Air Nostrum, Click Air, Vueling, and Iberia. He is passionate about flying, and it shows, as he constantly shares anecdotes from the many flights he has experienced. Every month he still boards Level planes as a captain to fly them to some of their destinations, going unnoticed by many of the company's employees. He attends to theCompanies From Level's headquarters in Viladecans, in the first interview given by the executive in this new phase.

From now on, passengers traveling with Level will see that the locator on their tickets begins with LL, as will be the case on airport screens when checking their gate. The first flight of this new phase took off yesterday at 6:30 p.m. from El Prat Airport bound for New York, debuting the new locator LL2627. The calls made by the pilots upon entering US airspace also featured another change, with the name Dalí used as the airline's identifier.

It's happening month after month. Barcelona Airport continues to grow and set new records. It does so after exceeding its theoretical capacity limit last year, when it recorded its first record. more than 55 million passengers, one of the main arguments for launching the El Prat expansion project, despite the social rejection that the extension of the third runway has aroused due to the environmental impacts. However, no airline has complained so far about having problems operating normally or because they are accumulating excessive delays, nor have passengers noticed it, with hot spots such as security checkpoints functioning better than previous years.

The agreement to expand El Prat Airport will not, a priori, change Iberia's long-standing strategy: to grow at Barajas Airport by expanding long-haul routes, primarily in Latin America, to turn it into a "large" airport. hub"that can compete with the major European airports. The airline has just presented its Flight Plan 2030, a document in which this commitment remains the backbone. On the contrary, it leaves the objective of giving wings to the Catalan airport in the hands of Level—the low-cost brand of the Spanish-British group IAG, which also includes Iberia and Vueling.

The business world is full of anglicisms, acronyms, and names that seem straight out of a superhero comic. If the Big Four are the four largest global consulting firms, in the United States the Big Three are made up of the trio of the country's main commercial airlines: American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and United Airlines. At the end of last year, this group of airlines was rubbing their hands together in anticipation of a year of greater tourism boom and record travel across the Atlantic. However, the trade war driven by Donald Trump has also put their business at risk, and the markets are already showing uncertainty surrounding the sector's immediate future, with falls in share values and more moderate-than-expected growth forecasts.

Catalonia's inter-University Council, formed by the Government and universities, has given up on asking graduate students to have a B2 level in English if they wish to obtain a degree. This is a clear step backwards. It can be disguised in many ways, but the facts are the facts: there will no longer be a rule that makes all graduates have a common minimum. And if there is no such requirement, there will be a proliferation of loopholes and excuses for laxity. The result will be that, as a country, we will continue to be at the bottom in terms of knowledge of English. This will make us economically and academically less competitive.