We'd be looking at 50 to 70. We have to establish exactly what it would be but much would depend on the Dubai hub growth.

Tim Clark

Categorized in : Business

With what's going on in and around this city I sometimes wonder if this is going to get across the final hurdle, even though the government has legislated to do it.

... By the end of next year we were to have eight of them. Now it doesn't look like we will have any.

We have very strong summer bookings at higher prices. by Tim Clark

We have very strong summer bookings at higher prices.

The velocity of growth (in bookings) exceeds what we had seen las... by Tim Clark

The velocity of growth (in bookings) exceeds what we had seen last year.

I told Scott about this buck, but I also made it clear that he’d have to give me five days of total commitment, no shooting smaller bucks, no asking to move to another spot. It was this buck or nothing, and I said if he didn’t want to do it, that was totally fine. He signed up, and on the last day of the hunt Scott was rewarded with a shot at this giant.

When I was first hired in April and word got out, within 24 hours I had 1,000 emails -- how these folks found me and got to me, I don’t know, the next day it was another 1,000 [emails] and it’s been that way ever since. I’m not recruiting volunteers because our volunteers are self-recruited.

They were already talking to each other online, putting up their... by Tim Clark

They were already talking to each other online, putting up their own signs and training each other.

On the one hand you save on the operating costs, but your yield starts to fall because your corporate business is disappearing so it's a double-edged sword, on balance, the airline community is doing better as a result of the lower oil price.

There seems to be a certain amount of cloudiness down there. One minute they are quite keen - I don't know if they can afford to do the A380neo and the (new) A350, airbus have got to rationalise a few things.

I know they want to build (the A380neo) and they know we want to buy it in large numbers, but there are some fallow years where they have to address that problem.

Yes we have issues of capacity... we're constantly attending to try and maximise, but for us to have ordered another 100 A380s, believe me if we could at Dubai International Airport, we would.

What happened in Sharm al-Sheikh last week, and to a lesser extent with the ... (Germanwings) aircraft, are game changers for our industry, they have to be addressed at industry level because no doubt the countries -- U.S., Europe -- I would think will make some fairly stringent, draconian demands on the way aviation works with security.

We would like them to get on with it. by Tim Clark

We would like them to get on with it.

We're still running the programme we signed for (in 2013), we've got aircraft coming in as you know, the Xs (777s) come in late-2018 and 2019. That's enough for the time being.

Now we're going to the manufacturers about the numbers that we need and the prices they're prepared to offer. We haven't got there in detail yet.

It (787-10) doesn't have the capability of lifting the payload to distances that we would want beyond about eight hours.

If you freeze, you restrict, you breach the Open Skies regime, that's a unilateral hostile act, you must cancel all anti-trust agreements immediately.

The agreement did not address things like the accusation they hav... by Tim Clark

The agreement did not address things like the accusation they have made against us.

Expand further from European hubs into the U.S.? Yes we might do that, the kind of abuse we've been getting might cause us to do it.

We might say to (Delta Air Lines chief executive) Richard Anderson that we're just going to do what the U.S. government wanted back in 1999, to go trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific with fifth freedom open skies.