Last Saturday the Finnish Airline Pilots’ Association instituted a ban on overtime hours for pilots, according to reports in the Finnish news agency, STT. The ban forced Finland’s largest airline to cancel three flights over the weekend.

According to statements released by the nation’s flagship carrier, no further cancellations would be necessary.

Passengers flying with Finnair on Monday were also affected by the weekend cancellations; however the airline successfully booked seats for them on alternative flights.

Finnair is currently engaged in discussions with the pilots’ union over pay and working conditions. The decision not to work overtime is the result of a breakdown in communication between the two groups.

Communication resumed on Friday last week when Juhani Salonius, the national conciliator, stepped in to supervise a new round of discussions.

This is not the first time Salonius has intervened in union disputes with Finnair. In November 2006, he helped mediate a dispute over Finnair’s intention to hire 500 new cabin crewmembers for its Asian routes through Aero Airlines, a company which pays its employees 30 per cent less than Finnair’s regular flight crew. The cabin crew went on strike for two days and finally accepted a settlement proposed by Salonius.

Finnair is considered the second-safest airline of all time and is headquartered in Vantaa Finland. The airline’s main hub is at Helsinki-Vantaa Airport. In 2006, Finnair reported 8.8 million passengers on their planes and offered 15 domestic destinations and 55 international destinations.

Iceland has been advertising itself recently as the perfect place for data storage. According to reports by Business Green, the country may be making major steps towards proving itself in the industry.

Iceland has been identified by many in the information technology field as a possible “data centre capital of the world” for several reasons. The country’s temperate climate reduces the need for cooling, and Iceland is known for providing cheap energy to business and individuals from sustainable resources, relying on geothermal power in most cases.

Many server farms, particularly those in the United States, are under pressure to become more environmentally friendly and cut back on their energy use, making relocation to Iceland an increasingly appealing proposition.

Icelandic data storage specialist Data Islandia and its partner Hitachi Data Systems recently announced a breakthrough in combating some of the hurdles Iceland has faced in becoming the ideal data storage location.

Access speed has been one of the largest challenges faced by Icelandic data storage centres. A new development called Data Scooter is designed to combat this problem. The Data Scooter is a device designed to transfer information between a company’s data centre and a facility in Iceland run by Data Islandia. Work on the facility should be complete by the end of this year.

Data Islandia’s managing director for offshore operations, Sol Squire, explained the situation. “It can take up to three days to transfer a petabyte of data by cable,” he said. “By putting the data on the Data Scooter and flying it [to Iceland] you can complete the data transfer in less than a day.”

According to Squire, the system is both cost effective and time effective when compared against sending data by cable. “The data is encrypted, it travels with a security guard, it doesn’t go through [Heathrow's] Terminal 5,” he said. “We also only delete the original version of the data once the transfer is fully complete.”