Seaplane service returns between Boston and New York

A Tailwind Air Cessna Grand Caravan EX Amphibian commuter seaplane landed on Boston Harbor after a flight from Manhattan last summer.Charles Krupa/Associated Press

AIR TRAVEL

Seaplane service returns

Tailwind Air will be resuming its Boston-New York seaplane service this year, and this time it will offer a full season of trips. Tailwind brought seaplane service back to Boston Harbor for the first time in decades last year, but it was for a truncated, four-month season. This time around, the service will begin on March 21 and continue until the end of November. One-way tickets will range in price from $395 to $795. That makes them more expensive than comparable flights on major airlines, but Tailwind CEO Alan Ram said his company offers a more convenient, faster way to fly between the two cities. The trips last under 90 minutes, from downtown to downtown. On the Boston side, passengers will board on a shuttle boat either at Fan Pier or Rowes Wharf, and taxi out to a floating dock in the harbor near Logan Airport. In New York, passengers disembark at the seaplane dock at East 23rd Street. Tailwind plans to offer three outbound trips from Boston each weekday, as well as three inbound trips, and also will offer a late Sunday flight, with the hope to add more service in the warmer months. Ram said he initially expected the vast majority of flights last year to be for business travel, but at least half were leisure trips. The company flies eight-passenger, amphibious Cessna Caravans staffed with two pilots. — JON CHESTO

SHOES

Former New Balance executive to run Clarks

A former New Balance executive has been picked to run Clarks, the British shoe company. Jonathan Ram will join Clarks in April, from HanesBrands, where he has been president of the Global Activewear group. Ram previously spent 16 years at New Balance. Ram will remain based in the Boston area but will spend considerable time at the corporate headquarters in the United Kingdom. The 6,500-person company’s US headquarters had been in Waltham, but it is moving to Needham; Clarks plans to open in one of the buildings on the former PTC campus in Needham later this year. — JON CHESTO

AFFORDABLE HOUSING

Amazon to build housing near transit stations in Seattle, D.C.

SEATTLE — Amazon said Tuesday it will spend more than $120 million to build affordable-housing units close to transit stations near Seattle and Washington, D.C., the latest example of a tech company trying to address the affordable housing crisis critics say the industry has exacerbated. Amazon said it is working with Sound Transit and the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority to construct a total of 1,060 homes near four public transit sites. The Washington state sites are in SeaTac and Bellevue. The other sites are in Maryland in the cities of New Carrollton and College Park. Amazon is building out another corporate hub in Arlington, Va., and is expanding operations in Bellevue, near its Seattle headquarters. — Associated Press

PAY EQUITY

Pay gap persisted during pandemic

The average amount of money American women make compared with men has stalled since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new study shows. After years of narrowing, the pay gap for women in the United States, which accounts for average pay across industries and occupations, held steady at 82 cents for every dollar a man makes over the past two years, according to the Payscale’s 2022 State of theGender Pay Gap report. The study was released on Tuesday, which is Equal Pay Day and marks how far into the year a woman must work to earn what her male counterpart did in the previous calendar year. The 82-cent gap hasn’t budged since coming in at 81 cents in 2019, according to the Payscale findings, which are basically inline with data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The shortfall is wider for women of color, and particularly for Native and Hispanic women, who last year earned 71 cents and 78 cents compared with white men, respectively, the Payscale study showed. Black women and those who were Hawaiian or Pacific Islander earned 79 cents compared with white men. — Bloomberg News

AIRLINES

Southwest growth hurt by hiring troubles

While its peers are slowing growth in flying to address rising fuel costs, Southwest Airlines has an additional reason: a shortage of workers. The carrier’s second-quarter capacity will decline 7 percent from 2019 levels “due to challenges with available staffing,” Chief financial officer Tammy Romo said Tuesday at a JPMorgan Chase industrial conference. Southwest still hopes to add 8,000 workers in 2022, on the way to hiring 25,000 over three years. The airline has struggled since at least last fall to hire enough staff, after thousands of people retired early or took buyouts when travel demand was nearly wiped out early in the coronavirus pandemic. Southwest has raised wages, added other incentives, and adopted new hiring tactics as it faces unprecedented competition, particularly for entry-level workers from companies like Amazon and CVS. — Bloomberg News

LANDMARKS

Eiffel Tower gets a new antenna — and about 20 more feet

PARIS — The Eiffel Tower grew by nearly 20 feet on Tuesday after engineers hoisted a new communications antenna at the very top of France’s most iconic landmark. Tourists watched from the Trocadero esplanade as the new digital radio antenna was helicoptered up. With the new antenna, the Eiffel Tower grew from 1,063 feet tall to 1,083 feet. The Eiffel Tower company’s president, Jean-François Martins, told The Associated Press that scientific progress is an integral part of the Iron Lady’s 133-year history. “From the invention of the radio at the beginning of the 20th century to right now, decades after decades, the Eiffel Tower has been a partner for all the radio technology,” Martins said. The Eiffel Tower was 1,024 feet high when it was inaugurated on March 31, 1889. — Associated Press

GOVERNMENT

SEC commissioner to step down

Allison Herren Lee said she plans to step down as a commissioner at the Securities and Exchange Commission, creating a second vacancy atop Wall Street’s main regulator. Lee, a Democrat, will stay at the watchdog until President Biden names her successor and that person is confirmed by the Senate, according to a statement Tuesday. Her term is set to expire in June. Lee, who has been a commissioner since 2019, served as acting chair of the agency last year. — Bloomberg News

E-COMMERCE

Online deals harder to come by during pandemic

The pandemic accelerated the boom in e-commerce in the United States, ushering a new era of inflation in what was once a heaven of discounts. Over the two years since the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, price increases have added $32 billion to what Americans have paid online for the same amount of goods, according to software company Adobe Inc., which tracks more than 10 million products. Last year, as inflation accelerated both online and in the physical world, price gains accounted for almost 31 percent of the overall growth in digital sales. — Bloomberg News

HOUSING

Rents hit an all-time high in January

US rent inflation reached yet another record in January, fueled by red-hot markets such as Miami. Single-family rental prices jumped 12.6 percent from a year earlier, according to the latest CoreLogic Single-Family Rent Index. All major metropolitan areas saw increases, but the Sun Belt experienced by far the biggest gains, with Miami’s asking rents up almost 39 percent. — Bloomberg News