Making local aviation history, an Airbus A380-800 touched down in Sri Lanka today for the first time. The unexpected first arrival was A6-EDN, an Emirates A380, enroute from Sydney and Auckland. Apparently the A380 needed to refuel and selected Colombo instead of its previously planned Singapore stop – due to shorter total flying time on the way from Sydney to Dubai via Colombo.

Flight details

EK414 AKL-SYD-CMB-DXB

Scheduled departure out of Auckland: 1840 Actual: 1848

Scheduled arrival into Sydney: 2005 Actual: 2022

Scheduled departure out of Sydney: 2145 Actual: 2320

Planned departure out of Singapore: 0545 for a 0900 arrival into Dubai – CANCELLED

Scheduled arrival into Colombo: 0235 Actual: 0433

Scheduled departure out of Colombo: 0540 Actual: 0526

Scheduled arrival into Dubai: 0825 Actual: 0819

The A380 had been delayed due to a bad weather situation at Sydney, which disrupted refueling and had to leave with an insufficient fuel load for reaching Dubai, in order to escape the Sydney airport closure. With this, a stop at Colombo had been pre-planned to refuel. The photos below are taken by an spotter on the field at the time, and are copyrighted to the photographer. The A380 was handled at Colombo by SriLankan Airlines Ground Handling.

Originally posted on Airline Industry Review

Dubai Air Show 2011 began on yesterday, the 13th November, 2011. Here’s a recap of what happened in Day 1 of the Mid East’s most prestigious air show.

• Show Stealer : Emirates orders 50 more Boeing 777-300ERs. Emirates literally stole the show yesterday by placing firm orders for 50 more Boeing 777-300ER aircraft and 20 options. Valued at $18b, this is the largest (in commercial value) order Boeing has received to-date. Emirates already has orders for 41 more 777s, while having 94 777s in its fleet as of now.
• Saudi Arabian Airlines confirmed that they will be using Rolls Royce Trent 700s for their extra A330-300s ordered in June.
• DAE Capital announced that it will be leasing nine Boeing 777 Freighters on a long term agreement to Emirates SkyCargo. The deliveries would be in the 2012-15 timeframe.
• Egypt’s PAS has ordered one Bombardier CRJ900 for delivery in Q1 2012.

Originally posted on Airline Industry Review

Emirates Airline appears to have cancelled planned flights to Baghdad, Iraq. It is believed lower than expected bookings caused to make the decision. The flights are no longer available for booking.
Emirates had planned to launch the flights on 1st July.

Disclaimer : Notice this is not a yet publicised decision and the airline might or might not decide to make flights available again.

Originally posted on Airline Industry Review

Emirates Airline today ordered 32 more Airbus A380s, valued $11.5b at ILA Air Show, Berlin.
This takes Emirates’ total orders for the A380 to 90.
Emirates was already the largest customer for the type.
This is also the largest dollar based valued aircraft order placed ever in the commercial aviation history.
Emirates already operates ten of the type.
This order has now boosted Airbus A380 to become the so-far best sold widebody aircraft of the year.
All 90 aircraft will be delivered by 2017.

Originally posted on Airline Industry Review

A reputed Sri Lankan business website, LBO, has reported that the Government of Sri Lanka has reached a deal with Emirates Airline to buy out the latter’s stake in SriLankan Airlines.
The stake will be bought out by state owned Bank of Ceylon ( BOC ) and Sri Lanka Insurance Corporation. A source close to the deal had claimed a price of around $60 million for the transaction.
Nishantha Wickramasinghe, Chairman of SriLankan Airlines, is quoted saying “The deal has been finalized”.
A senior official at the treasury had stated that the deal will be linked this month.
It is likely that the government is buying out only a part of the Emirates’ 43.6% stake since Emirates itself had bought out the stake for $70 million back in 1998. Emirates was quoted back in 2008 demanding around $150 million for a sale of the full stake.
SriLankan is about to take delivery of a new A330 soon .

Originally posted on Airline Industry Review

15 May 2010

COLOMBO ( Reuters ) – Sri Lanka has offered $55 million to buy back the 43.6 per cent stake Dubai’s Emirates airline holds in national carrier SriLankan Airlines, the island nation’s treasury secretary said on Friday.

Emirates, the Arab world’s largest

airline, had no immediate

comment, but earlier this week

had said it was willing to sell the

stake “at the right price.”

“Sri Lanka is going to buy it… $55

million is the price we have

indicated, ” P.B. Jayasundera,

secretary of the finance ministry

and the treasury, told Reuters in

an interview.

“The deal is almost done,”

Jayasundera said. “We are

looking for a strategic partner or

somebody from the government

to take that (the stake) and

maintain the commercial

character of SriLankan (Airlines). ”

He declined to say whether an

arm of the government would

take over the stake, or whether it

would be sold to an outside

partner.

The government will facilitate

the transfer “to Bank of Ceylon

or somebody who can basically

participate in a business, ”

Jayasundera said, referring to

the largest state-owned bank.

Source : Khaleej Times

Note that Emirates bought the SriLankan ( then Air Lanka ) stake in 1998, for $70 million. Emirates Airline President, Tim Clark, had previously stated that they will sell the 43.68% stake for around $150 million.

More on SriLankan
More on Emirates

Originally posted on Airline Industry Review

Emirates Airline has announced that it will be launching flights to Baghdad, Iraq from 1 July. The flight will be operated thrice weekly with an Airbus A330-200.
This is Iraq’s first widebody flight in recent history and Emirates’s worldwide connectivity is definitely set to bring a big plus to Iraq’s civil aviation, connectivity and tourism alike.

Emirates will be operating the three class version of A330 on this route.

EK 941 DXB0700 – 0830SDA 46 332
EK 942 SDA1030 – 1355DXB 46 332

EK 941 DXB0805 – 0935SDA 2 332
EK 942 SDA1135 – 1500DXB 2 332

Originally posted on Airline Industry Review

Oman Air was seen entering an ambitious growth path in the recent weeks, will it be able to reach Mid East’s top three, and make it a top four ?

Fast Facts

Oman Air was founded in 1981 and is largely owned by the Government of Oman. It remained as a silent, regional carrier till the beginning of 2009. One key reason for the change of direction is a change of leadership.

Change of Leadership

Mr. Peter Hill was appointed as the new Chief Executive Officer of WY in July 2008. Hill, a veteran of commercial aviation, started his aviation carrier at the age of 17 as a commercial trainee with British Airways. Then onwards he worked with Gulf Air, although he is most noticeable for his work with Emirates as a key executive from the beginning and most specially as the CEO of SriLankan Airlines. He deserves a word to be said about his tenure at SriLankan where he turned around an aging and loss making national carrier into a profitable one and steered the airline successfully throughout many hurdles such as a terrorist attack that destroyed half of the carriers’ fleet, the Boxing Day Tsunami that directly impacted Sri Lanka and SARS to name a few.

New Direction

Following the change of leadership, it appears that WY has decided to come out of its small position and aspire to become a leading carrier to the Middle East. This was signified with the launch of new long-haul flights to Europe and expansion of the fleet, which now includes one of the best cabin products in the sky.

New Destinations

The carrier launched five new destinations this year

It appears that the carrier is embarking on a hub and spoke model similar to Emirates and trying to achieve a share of the global traffic flows.

WY flies to 10 Indian destinations and this offers some underserved destinations such as Jaipur and Lucknow.

Oman Air has about a 55% share of all operations at Muscat and it offers nonstop service to 25 destinations.

The Fleet

Oman Air currently has a fleet of 18 aircraft, which consists of the following.

Note: Two A330-200s are leased from Jet Airways and are due to be returned following deliveries of the airline’s own aircraft.

As can be seen from the above list, Airbus A330 will form the airline’s long haul fleet while the Boeing 737 will be catering to the regional needs.

This in fact can be seen as a very good fleet composition given that the airline is unlikely to meet any heavy density routes in the near future. The airline is likely to stay true to this aircraft sizes, which is evident from the order for Boeing 787-8 s.

All aircraft are configured for two classes and the A330s feature a luxury cabin that can challenge the inflight products of many established airlines.

The Future Analysis

Most Arab countries do not have a large population and this is a key reason why most Arab carriers opt to build a network utilizing 6th freedom rights that carries a large number of transit traffic.
With the Oman’s population of around three million, there is no doubt that Oman Air will have to and will be following the same course.
However, with an ever increasing competition and a troubling economy that has so far affected travelling patterns, WY will have to differentiate itself and find its niche to grab a winning share.
The carrier certainly has figured this out very well and are offering their luxury product at regular rates.
Their new routes to Europe and the subcontinent are likely to bring them some good sales because of these reasons and they also have the support of the airport authority which plans to expand the airport’s capacity to 12 million passengers.
For the moment Oman Air does not seem to be competing head to head with the Top Three. And Oman Air does not seem to be having ‘huge’ orders or unrealistic targets too. This will make Oman Air a different carrier from the rest and the less congested environment at MCT itself will help WY attract transfer traffic. After all, starting small is good but it in fact never denies that WY can become big.
Muscat benefits from a strategical location as Emirates, Etihad and Qatar and with an owner that fully supports their expansion, Oman Air is well placed to become a different addition and a challenge to the Mid East Top Three. If everything goes right, the day that the Top Three becomes a Four will not be too far.

Note 1 : Flights to Colombo and Malé are scheduled to be launched on 24th October following a security clearance issue.

Photo copyright Christophe Ramos .

Originally posted on Airline Industry Review

SriLankan Airlines has seen its network being reduced dramatically in recent times – but is this exactly the right thing to do ? Airline Industry Review finds out.

The exit of Emirates from SriLankan saw the Chief Executive post being transferred from Peter Hill to Manoj Gunewardena, who is the brother of Presidential Advisor Sajin Vaas that drove the LCC Mihin Lanka to bankruptcy. Manoj however is a 25 year veteran with the airline having served in many positions and his takeover of the CEO post was seen as a natural progression by many. The new CEO launched a refleeting exercise for the narrowbody fleet and embarked a turnaround project for the airline to make the core operations profitable.
SriLankan Airlines Group, which consists of the airline, ground handling and SriLankan Catering, has most of the time being profitable, the core airline operations has not always been so and I fully agree with the Mr. Manoj in his belief that the airline should break even on its own – but should this come at the cost of cutting operations ?
To make the said operation profitability a reality – SriLankan did one thing majorly – CUTTING . From fleet to frequencies to onboard service and ontime performance, all are now in a lower level than they were while under EK management, however the reports for the last quarter is not out yet.

Indian Operations

© Sean D Silva

While under Peter Hill’s management, the airline was the largest foreign carrier into India, operating in excess of 110 weekly flights to 11 destinations – it is now down to a mere 46 to 6 destinations. Some quote this as a result owing to the fleet renewal – but in my opinion, it is NOT. SriLankan’s A320 fleet is now down to three from the previous five, but the aircraft can be much more utilized and the current fleet is well enough to operate daily flights to two to three more destinations under a 2.5h flying time.

New Destinations
The new management has so far launched one new destination – since they took over on 1st April 2008 – Rome . But not really a new flight though. The airline now uses Rome as a tag on to its Paris route, but on a rather inefficient routing, as CMB-CDG-FCO .
But the number of cancelled destinations outnumbers this single new route launch.

Codeshares

Prior to ceasing of the management contract, Emirates was UL’s biggest codeshare partner with flights to more than a dozen destinations including the US and the ceasing of management contract saw the end to this codeshare deal too. To fill the gaps, SriLankan soon joined with Etihad, which is now one of SriLankan’s biggest codeshare partners.
However, UL was still lacking access to the US and Australia under the Etihad deal and to void this hole, it entered into a codeshare deal with Malaysia Airlines. The deal took a long time to be completed since UPS, the express freight service based in US, fully opposed this deal as they were once not allowed by Malaysia to operate flights to Subang (IIRC). After so many appeals, MAS and UL however finally were allowed and UL now codeshares on MAS’s heavily loss making KUL-TPE-LAX flight. But has this been successful ? Definitely not.
As opposed to quick connections at Dubai with EK, now UL’s passengers have to wait for 7-8 hours at Kuala Lampur in order to connect to MAS’s flights and inspite of direct flights to US, now they have to experience two stops, which is also not on a so comfortable 777-200ER.

Frequent Flyer Programme
Yet another thing that UL lost with EK’s departure was Skywards, the frequent flyer programme the two had built since late 1990s. To replace this, SriLankan created FlySmiLes, a programme with identical tiers but lesser benefits and you have to manually redeem points by providing your boarding pass – long gone are the days of automatic Skywards miles.
The customer response has been very poor, with only 3% of previous Skywards customers signing up.
When asked about this by a local newspaper sometime ago, the management had however responded that “It took Emirates years to make their frequent flyer programme popular”.

CUTS
The highlight of this article – CUTS.

Fleet : From 16 to 12
Freighter services : Fully suspended
Indian flights : From 110 weekly to 46 weekly
SIN flights : From 14 to 7
KUL flights : From 14 to 7
DXB flights : From 14 to 7
KWI flights : From 9 to 7
NRT flights : From 3 to 2
CDG flights : From 5 to 3, and coupled with FCO
TRV flights : From 14 to 7
BLR flights : From 7 to 4
Flights to CCJ, COK, HYD, GOI and GAY fully suspended.

Notice that most of these cuts took place well before the global decline in demand. Nevertheless, most other airlines have increased flights to Colombo, specially following the end of war. A good example is Emirates, where it now operates 18 weekly flights from DXB instead of the previous 8 or 9 weekly flights.

The solution
The point of this article however was not to personally attack on anybody at SriLankan, but instead to discuss what can be and should be improved. SriLankan has a superb workforce which has done some unbelievable stuff – back in 2001, when the Tamil Tiger terrorists destroyed a half of its fleet, the engineers repaired the attacked aircraft in a suprising three months – which Airbus had estimated to take at least nine months and the airline has been through some of the worst crisis of recent times including, but not limited to SARS, the 2004 Tsunami and terrorist attacks. So they truly have the power to overcome all these and succeed . What can be done to can be done to achieve this ?

This is what I propose.
* Taking advantage of the newly dawn peace in Sri Lanka, UL should expand again and reinstate Colombo as a major hub and a gateway to South Asia. Its strategic geographical location and second-to-none tourist attractions will help make this a reality.

Fleet overhaul

©Thomas Ernst

I would suggest UL to add 2 A330-200s, two A321-200s and two DHC 6 Twin Otter aircraft along with an A310 freighter. The A321s will be used for regional travel and the Twin Otters will be used to relaunch its highly popular domestic tourist flights. The favorable lease terms in the market right now will help reap the harvest of this essential investment.
The Business Class on certain A340s and A330s should be refurbished with the installation of 18 flat bed seats.
– SriLankan’s newly added narrowbodies should be good enough for a few more years and their widebody fleet ( of five A340s and four A330s ) should be replaced by either a mix of 787s or A350s, both of which have the capability to replace both A330 and A340 fleets. Since neither A350 nor 787 delivery slots are available till at least 2014, I believe that SriLankan should add more A330-200s to its fleet.
- One might argue that the A340s would be a better fit to SriLankan, but UL simply does not have that many routes to be used by an A340-500 or A340-600 and CMB’s runway is not lengthy enough to permit a fully laden A340-600 departure to LHR at noon hours too. Hence the only suitable aircraft would be A340-300. But since there simply is not much of a difference in terms of performance between A340-300 and A330-200 and because of a better resale value, the A330-200 emerges as the clear winner here.

Network
- I would suggest the following changes
LHR – up to twice daily from current 12 weekly
SIN & KUL – relaunch of the twice daily triangular flights
CDG – to be delinked from FCO. Two weekly flights to be operated nonstop with one going via MLE. To be operated solely by A330s.
FCO – to be relaunched as UL585/6 with twice weekly flights continuing onwards to MXP. One weekly flight to be operated as UL583/4 on a CMB-MLE-FCO-MLE routing.
PEK – to be increased to five weekly flights with two new flights going via MLE on a CMB-MLE-PEK-MLE-CMB routing.
KWI – to be increased from 7 to 9 weekly with addition of two new nonstop twice weekly flights.
BLR – to be increased from 4 weekly to daily using A321s and A320s.
BKK – to be increased from 7 to 9 weekly with UL424/5 evening flight on days 4 and 6 using A330s.
FRA – to be increased from 4 to 5 weekly flights.

New destinations to be launched
MAN ( Manchester ) – thrice weekly aboard A330s. The demand certainly is there.
SYD ( Sydney ) and MEL ( Melbourne ) – The largest Sri Lankan community outside Sri Lanka resides in Melbourne, but however the bilateral agreement between Sri Lanka and Australia calls for four weekly flights to be in place once an air service is launched between the two countries, since the yield to MEL cannot justify four weekly flights, the flights would be launched in the following manner.
UL678/9 CMB-SYD-CMB 0500-2000-2120-0330+1 1,4 332
UL666/7 CMB-MEL-SYD-CMB 0255-1730-1835-2000-2120-0330+1 2,6 332
All times local
HYD ( Hyderabad ) – Should be relaunched with four weekly A320 flights.
COK ( Cochin ) – Should be relaunched with four weekly A320 flights.
CGK ( Jakarta ) – Twice weekly A321 flights.
KTM ( Kathmandu ) – Thrice weekly A320 flights.
ISB ( Islamabad ) – Twice weekly A320 flights via BOM
ZRH ( Zurich ) – ZRH will be launched with initially twice weekly flights on CMB-MLE-ZRH-MLE-CMB route and once weekly nonstop CMB-ZRH-CMB using A330s.
MXP ( Milan ) – Twice weekly CMB-FCO-MXP-CMB as mentioned above.

SriLankan SkyChain Freighter network.
Although global freight market as a whole is not in a much good climate, the South Asian region appears to be less affected and thanks to CMB being a popular cargo port – UL will be able to make a sizeable presence on regional freight by capitalizing on these advantages. When the market returns to normal, these investments will reap back their harvest.
DXB ( Dubai ) – 2 weekly
TRV ( Trivandrum ) – weekly
MAA ( Chennai ) – 2 weekly
MLE ( Malé ) – 2 weekly
BKK ( Bangkok ) – 2 weekly
BLR ( Bangalore ) – weekly
SHJ ( Sharjah ) – weekly

Marketing
SriLankan needs to take its message to a wider audience and should make the best use of its website and social networks. They should also influence more Sri Lankans to fly by using innovative methods such as mobile advertising and enabling innovative methods to book flights – eg: using a bank centre.

The idea of this business plan is to make investment at the right time and to have become a leading player in the regional market by the time market recovers. This certainly can be done.
SriLankan already has a very high inflight service standard with a great crew which is sure set to make anyone want to fly again with them. But the above mentioned steps are not enough to make SriLankan a leader in the region again – the government shall stay away from the airline and let the management take independent decisions. They should not be afraid to try new things and should make the best use of CMB as a hub, although it is a long way to go – CMB certainly is a far better connecting point to South East Asia and Australia than DXB, AUH and DOH are.
Emirates sure did some good to SriLankan, but in many people’s belief – Emirates was benefited from the deal much more than tiny UL did. It is said that EK took away landing slots of UL at some major airports and it was a popular fact that they did not want UL to resume flights to Australia and some other destinations. It was also said that EK did not allow UL’s plan to purchase A321s for Indian routes. Now that SriLankan is free, they should nomore remain lost in time – SriLankan, now is the time for you to grow !

What do you think ?
Please leave a comment and let me know.

Originally posted on Airline Industry Review