Interview: Paulo Mirpuri, Hi Fly CEO

Hi Fly finds new customer for 'Save The Coral Reefs' A380

The world’s most recognizable Airbus A380 has been allocated to a new customer for the coming summer season.

The coral reef-themed jet is operated by Hi Fly, a wet-lease company that provides aircraft and crew to airlines on short-term contracts. Hi Fly acquired the double-decker plane from Singapore Airlines last year in the first transaction of its kind in the secondary market.

Having undergone maintenance work this winter the aircraft is now ready for commercial service and will be placed with a single customer during the IATA summer season, which runs from late March to late October.

Interview: Talal Abdulkarim, Syrian Arab Airlines CEO

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Syrian Arab Airlines provoked a curious mixture of applause and raised eyebrows at the annual meeting of the Arab Air Carriers Organisation (AACO) in Cairo in November, when chief executive, Talal Abdulkarim, urged the industry group to hold its next get-together in Damascus.

The Syrian capital would not have been the first venue to spring to mind when AACO began making plans for its 2019 meeting. In all honesty, it was probably dead last.

Syria has been torn apart by eight years of brutal civil war that began with an Arab Spring uprising but quickly morphed into a multi-faceted battle between regional governments, world powers and a spectrum of rebel groups – most notorious among them the fanatical Islamists of Daesh, who at one point controlled roughly half the country...

Pichler flies the flag against the high threat of low-cost

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Ryanair’s decision to launch 14 routes to Jordan last year could easily have been a disaster for Royal Jordanian Airlines, the country’s flag-carrier.

Only two other Middle Eastern and North African nations – Israel and Morocco – have experienced a large-scale influx of low-cost airlines from Europe. The flag-carriers of both countries struggled financially when their markets opened up to no-frills competition.

Yet, despite facing the same headwinds, Royal Jordanian delivered an 87% rise in net profits in the first nine months of last year, accelerating the turnaround launched by new chief executive Stefan Pichler...

Europe’s largest regional airline is bought for the price of a West London flat

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If a good compromise is one where all parties are left dissatisfied, this week’s bailout of Flybe by Connect Airways—a consortium led by Virgin Atlantic, Britain’s second-largest airline—must be a very good deal indeed. Bosses of the regional airline, which is Europe’s largest, have the ignominy of selling a company once worth a quarter of a billion pounds for just £2.8m ($3.6m). Investors will be paid just 1p for shares they might have purchased for £3.41 when the airline was listed on the London Stock Exchange eight years ago. And the consortium—including Stobart Group, which owns an Irish regional airline—inherits £82m of debt and relatively few assets for its trouble...

Last laugh for WOW Air as Indigo swoops, Icelandair fumbles

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“Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer” was almost certainly the rationale behind Icelandair’s now-canceled decision to take over WOW Air this month.

The Icelandic flag-carrier has steadily lost market share since its lower-cost, more nimble, better marketed rival took to the skies in 2012 – copying its intercontinental hub model but with greater efficiencies and a stronger brand.

When Icelandair walked away from the deal yesterday – essentially hinting that WOW’s financial problems were terminal – pundits sounded a death knell for the younger carrier. WOW’s founder, Skuli Mogensen, had been candid that his airline was struggling amid high oil prices and market jitters over the collapse of Primera Air, another low-cost long-haul airline. Joining forces with a flag-carrier he had publicly berated for years appeared to be a final, grudging throw of the dice...

British Airways should not be allowed to buy Flybe

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Within days of putting itself up for sale, Flybe, a beleaguered regional airline based in Britain, has attracted interest from the country’s two largest carriers. Its executives are hoping for a bidding war between International Airlines Group (IAG), which is the parent company of British Airways (BA), Britain’s flag carrier, and Virgin Atlantic, its main rival. Flybe’s shares have surged in value due to the tussle. But only one of the bids would be good for the travelling public...

Flybe is in urgent need of a new strategy

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Despite plying European skies for nearly four decades, Flybe, a regional airline based in Exeter, Britain, has never suffered a major safety-related incident. Its pilots and technicians deserve much praise for this stellar safety record. Sadly, investors in the airline have not been looked after nearly as well. Those who bought shares in the firm when it listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2010 and still have them are nursing a massive 97% loss in value. Recent profit warnings have compelled Flybe’s board to put it up for sale–nine months after spurning a takeover attempt...

How Syria’s flag carrier plans to remain airborne

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About a decade ago Syrian Arab Airlines, the state-owned flag carrier of Syria, was planning an order for 50 shiny new Airbus jetliners. They never arrived. Today it operates five elderly ones. The country’s ability to expand its civilian fleet with Western aircraft stumbled when President Bashar al-Assad took the reins from his father in 2000. It disintegrated 13 years later, when civil war swept across Syria and Mr Assad shocked the world with his indiscriminate military tactics, including the use of chemical weapons against civilians. With a helping hand from Russia, his brutal methods have succeeded. His troops now control about 85% of Syrian territory. And SyrianAir is once again shopping for planes—albeit, this time, in Moscow...

Syphax back from the dead

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Mohamed Frikha could not have picked a worse time to establish his airline than 2011, the year in which Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was ousted in a popular revolt that served as the spark for the Arab Spring uprisings.

Although it seemed like a period of renewal and change in Tunisia – and, indeed, the North African country has fared much better than its neighbours in the years that have followed – fortune was not smiling on Syphax.

Flag-carrier Tunisair threw down the first hurdle by instructing its ground-handling division to block its rival’s very first flight. Then airspace in Libya – a vital market for any Tunisian airline – was shut down as that country spiralled into civil war. Soon after, a pair of Daesh terror attacks targeting holidaymakers in Tunis and Sousse decimated tourism demand in Tunisia. And finally, technical problems with the airline’s Airbus A330 grounded its only long-haul route to Montreal.

“We did not have luck,” Frikha shrugs...

Interview: Nevzat Arşan, AtlasGlobal CCO

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AtlasGlobal’s chairman, Murat Ersoy, turned heads last year when he pledged to create an alliance of nine different airlines spread across the world.

The Turkish carrier’s appetite for overseas subsidiaries was not by itself surprising. The company rebranded from AtlasJet in 2015 to underline its global aspirations, and it already holds shares in three such ventures: AtlasGlobal Ukraine, Iraq’s ZagrosJet and Kazakhstan’s Jet One.

But the scale of the plan – and its focus on protected markets like Saudi Arabia and Russia – shocked many, particularly given the difficulties that Ersoy has encountered with his existing subsidiaries...