Emirates’ Tim Clark backs A380s for all Australian flights

Emirates Airline president Tim Clark wants the Middle East carrier to fly nothing but A380 superjumbos to Australia.

Emirates Airline president Tim Clark in Sydney. Picture: Renee Nowytarger

Emirates Airline president Tim Clark wants the Middle East carrier to fly nothing but A380 superjumbos to Australia as part of a ramp-up of its partnership with Qantas to fend off competition from other airlines.

Mr Clark — who was in Sydney after a weekend pow-wow with Qantas boss Alan Joyce at the $2300-a-night Wolgan Valley spa resort in the Blue Mountains — has doubled-down on his bet that the Airbus A380 will be the future of global aviation, saying the world’s largest passenger aircraft will continue to play an important role in connecting Australians with the rest of the world.

“We are growing capacity simply by up-gauging to the A380 and we will continue to gradually bring more and more of those in,” Mr Clark told The Australian.

“I really want to consolidate the whole product on to 380s eventually.”

Emirates has 77 flights per week to Australia from its Dubai hub and by the end of this month 49 of those will be flown with the A380 as the airline rationalises its fleet and puts more superjumbos into service.

The airline will retire its remaining Airbus A330s, A340s and Boeing 777-200ERs by the end of this month, which will leave it with a fleet consisting of A380s and Boeing 777s.

Mr Clark said Emirates had ambitions to extend its reach in Australia by establishing new routes to secondary airports such as Darwin or Cairns, but said he first wanted all of the airline’s Australian routes to be operating with A380s.

“At the moment it is about up-gauging. There are other points that could be of interest to us later on with perhaps a twin (engine plane) but we are not there yet,” he said.

“Once we have consolidated that we can then start looking at other points. But at the moment a lot of things are in flatline. The European economy flatlined, the Asian economies have slowed and a lot of capacity has come into market which was purchased years ago. So we have to wait and see where things go and then we’ll look at other places.”

Emirates’ commitment to the A380 is at odds with most of the global airline community which is increasingly moving away from the 500-seater plane and on to smaller, more fuel-efficient and longer range twin-engine jets like Boeing’s Dreamliner and Airbus’s A350.

In August Qantas said it didn’t want the remaining eight A380s it still had on order as they didn’t fit into its strategy to focus on direct routes between smaller cities rather than larger hubs with more passengers to fill bigger planes.

But Mr Clark believes the future remains bright for the superjumbo.

“It’s absolutely critical to do what we do,” he said.

“We want them (A380s) but others for reasons best known to themselves can’t seem to make it work. I’m not saying Qantas is wrong but if it was me, I would be saying I’d like to keep them, but I’m not going to comment on how they go about their fleet planning.”

The jitters infecting global economies, threats of terror and the continued volatility of the oil price had concocted a tough operating environment for airlines, Mr Clark said.

“It’s tough at the moment, there’s no question about it and that’s not just in Australia, that’s everywhere,” he said. “So we are resetting a lot of our program design and looking at routes that are not growing at the rate we would like. So we are realigning a lot of things and the industry as a whole is going through this.”

Mr Clark said the airline was committed to strengthening its alliance with Qantas to help the airlines overcome the competitive threats in the Australian market.

“We both want to extract more value out of this partnership, to develop and grow it and look at new ways to engage with the consumer to improve the way this partnership operates,” Mr Clark said.

“Australia has become an incredibly competitive market with more and more players coming in with high-end products and very low prices. So we were talking about how the partnership can go forward in that kind of situation and improve the way it does things and bringing in new aircraft and products into the market. If you look at the things we are doing in Emirates anyway, whether it be the product or the frequent flyer program, and then look at the Qantas frequent flyer program which is huge, how we can merge all of that and extract value, that in itself is a major development for us.”

Faced with increased competition into Australia from rivals Etihad and Qatar Airways, Mr Clark said only “time would tell” if the Australian market could sustain three Gulf carriers.

“I think it will be a little bit worrying if unlimited capacity, unconstrained, was brought into the market. I’m a free marketeer, I’m a great believer in competition but there are access issues in Australia in terms of what you can take into airports like Mascot and we all have 380s that we want to bring in,” he said.

“So if you overcook capacity and oversaturate it then everybody goes south. Already we are seeing prices come right down, well below what we’ve seen in the past.”