Holidaymakers will have been forgiven for steering clear of Athens at the height of the euro-zone crisis, when anti-austerity protests turned violent across the Greek capital. Footfall at Athens International Airport fell from 16.2m in 2009 to 12.9m in 2012. The foreign exodus was compounded by weak domestic demand, which slumped 26% as Greeks tightened their belts. The September 2009 launch of Olympic Air, a re-privatised version of Greece’s flag carrier, could not have been timed worse. Within months the carrier, which flies mostly domestic routes, tried to merge with Aegean Airlines, the country’s main international operator, as its only means of survival. European competition regulators threw out its proposal...
When footage of an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 787 on fire at London Heathrow Airport was broadcast around the world in July 2013, the industry braced itself for another potential setback to the Dreamliner programme.
The global 787 fleet had already been grounded for three months following a series of electrical fires caused by on-board lithium-ion batteries.
With the Ethiopian blaze breaking out in the upper aft fuselage of the stationary aircraft – well away from the main and APU batteries – it was clear that Boeing had a new problem on its hands. Britain’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch quickly placed the blame on an incorrectly installed battery within the aircraft’s Emergency Locator Transmitter, allowing the industry to breathe a collective sigh of relief...
Holding your cards close to your chest is a wise strategy when negotiating commercial partnerships. So it should come as no surprise that Shaikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum, chairman of Emirates Airline, appears to have rebuffed Andrew Robb, Australia’s Minister for Trade and Investment, during his recent visit to Dubai.
Robb had met with Shaikh Ahmed, begging bowl in hand, after declaring to Al Arabiya News that he “will explicitly mention” the subject of an equity investment in Qantas. The Australian flag carrier has had an entrenched commercial partnership with Emirates, Dubai’s flag carrier, since last year. The statement was a bold move by the minister, especially given the repeated asseverations by Emirates’ senior management team – also including president Tim Clark – that Dubai has absolutely no intention of pumping cash into its Australian affiliate...
South African Airways (SAA) has been taken to task by Solidarity, a trade union, over its discriminatory hiring practices for pilots. The union is angry with the state-owned carrier's decision not to admit Daniël Hoffman to its cadet pilot programme for the second year in a row. Mr Hoffman, whose theory and psychometric tests were described as exceptional by Solidarity, is a white male. That puts him at a handicap against other applicants because of the airline's self-professed bias towards hiring black, coloured (mixed race), Indian or white female pilots...
On February 28th an Atlasjet flight from Istanbul to Crimea made a U-turn over the Black Sea and headed back to Turkey. The pilots had been informed that Simferopol Airport, the main gateway to the peninsula, was occupied by unidentified armed men. Few doubted that the assailants were Russian special forces, whose seizure of strategic buildings would mark the beginning of the annexation of Crimea. It did not take foreign airlines long to see the writing on the wall. Atlasjet, Turkish Airlines, Azerbaijan Airlines and Latvia’s Air Baltic all suspended flights to the peninsula. So too, eventually, did Ukraine’s flag-carrier, Ukraine International Airlines...
There is no denying that the past three years have been a torrid time for Egyptian tourism. Hopes of a quick recovery after the 2011 Arab Spring were dashed by last year’s military coup against the Muslim Brotherhood. The bombing of a tourist bus in Sinai this February further unnerved visitors, although militants have predominantly directed their wrath at security forces.
Tourism revenue fell 43% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2014 to just $1.3 billion, accelerating the downturn triggered by last July’s overthrow of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi. Full-year revenue had already fallen 41% in 2013, when just 9.5 million tourists visited the country compared with 14.7 million back in 2010...
