JEDDAH, 2 July — Gulf Air has become the only airline in the region to receive Airbus Industrie’s operational excellence award for 2000-01, which recognizes the outstanding performance and reliability of its fleet of Airbus A340 aircraft. Airbus representatives presented the award to James Hogan, Gulf Air’s president and chief executive, in Bahrain, according to the airline’s Jeddah office yesterday. “We’re delighted to honor Gulf Air, which has achieved almost perfect utilization of this type of Airbus aircraft. Our assessment indicated that the flagship carrier of Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Oman, scored near perfect results in the criteria of dispatch reliability, the number of hours the aircraft flew, and the number of departures and arrivals it made. Between 2000-01, the airline’s Airbus A340s recorded a fleet reliability rate of 98 percent and made several thousand departures and landings,” Hogan added. (K.S. Ramkumar)