GERALD BUTT / NICOSIA
Governments are being urged to help as Middle East carriers suffer traffic drop
Arab airlines are appealing to governments in the Middle East to ease travel restrictions to encourage intra-regional air services to compensate for a sharp drop in passenger traffic to other parts of the world.
Following a meeting of the executive committee of the Arab Air Transport Union in Cairo on 13 October, Saudi Arabian Airlines chairman Khaled Bin Bakr said: "We call on the Arab states to facilitate granting entry visas to Arab citizens to enable airlines to organise flights to help face the difficult current conditions."
According to EgyptAir chief Mohammed Fahim Rayyan, the committee was "confident" that Arab governments would come to the aid of their national airlines to prevent them from going under.
Abdel-Wahab Teffaha, secretary-general of the Arab Air Carriers Organisation (AACO), says that prior to 11 September, regional carriers were already facing financial losses due to the global economic slowdown, but these losses could now reach $10 billion.
Bookings for AACO members have dropped by an average of 15% on services between the Middle East and Europe, says Teffaha, while some airlines have suffered even more heavily.
The Arab aviation industry has "seen nothing like this before and the magnitude of the crisis is not fully recognised. It is definitely much worse than the Gulf War," he says.
The ability of Arab airlines to cope with tough business conditions, Teffaha says, is limited by government employment guarantees for many of the state-owned flag carriers.
Despite the crisis, passenger movements within the Middle East are still holding up reasonably well, with EgyptAir, for example, encountering only a 5% drop in these services since 11 September, while demand for seats on international routes is down by around 20%. The Egyptian carrier has announced that is is laying off 900 part-time employees as a cost-cutting measure.
Royal Air Maroc, meanwhile, has ordered "drastic reductions of between 20% and 50% in all operational expenses", and has put off for one year the scheduled 2002 delivery of two Boeing 737s.
Source: Flight International
