"The president of Emirates expects to have all its planes flying in two years’ time, including its fleet of A380 superjumbo jets." – Financial Times link, 22 mai.
Emirates expects all its aircraft to be flying in 2 years. Airline’s head tells FT he plans to fully deploy fleet including A380 superjumbo by summer of 2022.
The president of Emirates expects to have all its planes flying in two years’ time, including its fleet of A380 superjumbo jets. Tim Clark, who heads the Dubai-based carrier, said its current fleet of A380s, which will cease to be manufactured from next year, would continue to play an important part in the airline’s future. He said the carrier, one of the world’s largest, was planning to fully deploy all its aircraft in the summer of 2022 based on its outlook for a recovery in air travel to take up to two years.
It comes as other airlines also laid out their recovery plans this month, with British Airways owner IAG forecasting it would take three years before passenger demand returned to normal. Ryanair plans to resume about 40 per cent of its flights in July.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Sir Tim dismissed suggestions that Emirates would permanently decommission a large portion of its 115-strong A380 fleet. “At the moment, I’ve got 115 sitting there. We’ve always known that up until that point in time . . . in 2022 there are going to be a number that will have to go into long-term storage,” he said.
“We’re not getting rid of any of them apart from I think three that are coming out and nine 777s that were scheduled to come out this year.” He added that the A380 had a “place in the Emirates international network on the scale it has before. Albeit not today or fully next year, but the year after I think there will be a place for it and I think it is going to be extremely popular.”
Sir Tim’s comments come just days after Air France announced a €500m writedown as it said it would permanently withdraw its fleet of nine A380s. Last year Airbus announced plans to stop making the 550-seat double-decker in 2021 following poor sales. It has eight to build for Emirates, but Sir Tim would not comment on speculation it might cancel this order although he acknowledged it was in talks with Airbus.
Emirates this week became the latest airline to tentatively restart a small number of routes, including Australia to UK, after halting its regular operations since the end of March following widespread lockdowns and travel restrictions around the world.
The Dubai-based airline, followed by Qatar Airways and Abu Dhabi’s Etihad, has disrupted the aviation industry over the past two decades with their superconnector model, linking east and west through three Gulf hubs. But alongside its rivals, it has been hit hard by the coronavirus crisis.
This month, the airline warned it would have a “huge impact” on its future financial performance as it forecast it would take at least 18 months for travel demand to return to some normality. The government-owned airline has in the first three months of this calendar year raised Dh4.4bn ($1.2bn) in additional liquidity through term loans and other facilities and will continue to tap the bank market to cushion the impact of Covid-19 on cash flow.
Sir Tim would not comment on how many job cuts the airline will have to make. “All I will say is that the optimistic [business] scenario is driving what we do now and therefore the business has to be structured in such a way on the basis of that way forward.”
But he stood by Emirates’ hub strategy. “It’s a business model that has worked for us extremely well for the last 35 years. “We have made money every single year bar six months of one of them and it has worked in the most horrific of trading conditions, geopolitical conditions and social economic conditions. As the world has transformed itself from 1985 to 2020, Emirates has grown with it.”
Emirates (EK) har 115 A380 i flåten.
