ALKHOBAR, 28 September — In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in the United States, airlines worldwide were forced to curtail operations. Now some airlines have been able to restart flights while others continue to cutback.
Lufthansa German Airlines has announced that effective Sept. 29 they will resume their flights Frankfurt-Riyadh-Dammam.
Lufthansa’s flights to the Kingdom will depart from Frankfurt at 13:30 every Saturday, Monday and Wednesday. Return flights will leave from Dammam at 23:55 on Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday.
Gulf Air will also be resuming its flights to Colombo, Sri Lanka on Sept. 29. Operations to Colombo were suspended on Sept. 18, as a result of the prohibitive cost of insuring aircraft and passengers on the Sri Lanka route.
The carrier will have four flights weekly from the Gulf Region. In addition, Gulf Air has received the required guarantee of $2 billion to cover third party war risk insurance from its four owner states — Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Qatar and Oman.
While British Airways was initially able to maintain its services to the Gulf Region after the attacks on Sept. 11, yesterday it announced major cutbacks globally.
Chris Phipps, KSA country manager, British Airways said that the airline was, “doing all the things that a responsible company does in these circumstances.”
Before the specific reduction measures were announced, BA already had a hiring freeze in place and was very tightly managing expenditure. Phipps felt that the cutbacks were a temporary result of market forces.
“Despite the difficult market, British Airways is a well established business with a strong balance sheet and a well defined long term strategy,” said Phipps. “We have worked through challenging conditions before and we have no reason to believe we can not again.”
The changes to BA’s route network will lead to a reduction in capacity of nine percent and the loss of approximately 7,000 jobs. BA’s Middle East services from Heathrow to Jeddah, Dubai, Bahrain, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Muscat, and Kuwait will be cut back. Its Heathrow-Islamabad service remains suspended. There will be no BA flights from London Gatwick to New York JFK, and a reduction of one daily service from London Heathrow to New York, JFK and Boston, with five fewer flights a week to Washington, D.C.
BA will also reduce services to Europe resulting in the loss of 20 flights daily from Gatwick. The changes represent a total of 190 fewer scheduled services a week. In addition there will be the accelerated transfer of services from Gatwick to Heathrow, which will include moving BA’s Dhahran flights.
David Spurlock, BA’s director of strategy, said: “We have transferred services from Gatwick to Heathrow where experience has shown us the prospects for future profitability are stronger. Duplication can also be reduced. However, we remain committed to our presence at Gatwick, which plays a key part in our network. This is the first phase of measures to address the changing conditions. We are reviewing the market and our network on a week-to-week basis and consequently will quickly address further issues as they arise in order to protect our business.
