SAO JOSE DOS CAMPOS, Brazil, 14 August 2007 — When Saudi Arabian Airlines received their 15 E-170 jets last year from Embraer in Brazil, their reception by the flying public in the Kingdom was less than stellar.
Complaints about the plane being too small, not having enough onboard luggage storage and problems with balancing the plane were rife. Saudi air travelers are notorious for carrying on huge amounts of hand luggage and thus felt that they had less room to stow their baggage in the E-170 compared to a larger Boeing 737.
In fact, according to Rodrigo Silva e Souza, Embraer’s product strategy manager for the E-Jets, the E-170s overhead storage bins are smaller “because we have only four passengers in a row, unlike in a Boeing or Airbus which have six passengers across.”
“In Saudia’s case, some passengers brought extra large luggage aboard, so of course they found it didn’t fit and this led to some complaints,” he further explained. Saudia is using the E-170s on lower density, domestic routes, such as Riyadh-Najran and Riyadh-Buraidah, instead of larger Boeing 737s that it can now deploy on more busy routes.
“This saves us money by allowing us to fill up more of the seats on each flight, in this case 70 seats versus 105 seats on a B-737, and it also allows us to offer more flights per day on these less busy routes which gives passengers more flying time choices,” said Abdulah M. Al-Ajhar, the chief executive of public relations at Saudi Arabian Airlines.
“We’ve managed costs savings of around 25 percent on the routes where we substituted the E-170 jet for bigger planes,” he explained. As for the balancing problem, Silva e Souza said that Saudia had initial problems with the center of balance of the E-170 planes, but that Embraer engineers were able to fix the problem quickly.
“Getting the right balance in any aircraft is very important,” said Silva e Souza. “We give each airline balance guidelines. When Saudia reported this problem to us, we saw that they were operating within the limitations. The times they had problems was when the plane was full and the luggage was not loaded in a symmetrical way. We had them shift the center of gravity of the plane to solve this problem.”
Despite the initial negative reception of the E-170s by the Saudi public, Embraer is keen on selling more planes to Saudia, and the airline said that it would study carefully any proposal set forward by the Brazilian manufacturer.