JEDDAH, 14 October 2005 — Sir Michael Bishop, chairman of British Midland International airline (BMi), said on Wednesday that he was “very encouraged with the start of the service and we would like to have more services to the Kingdom.”
Not willing to give a definite answer to the question of a second route to the Kingdom terminating in Jeddah, he said that, “We are making an assessment of that operation and it is very much our hope that, if these are positive and satisfactory, we would be able to announce a start date some time in early 2006.”
He explained that the earliest date any projected would start is March 28 2006, which coincides with the start of the Northern Hemisphere summer timetable. “It may be then, it may be after that; it depends entirely on our operational and commercial assessment of the route,” he said.
BMi is currently constrained in the frequencies of their service to the Kingdom by the bilateral air agreement but are operating the Riyadh services to the maximum we allowed. Commenting on the service over the six weeks since its inception on Sept. 1 he said, “It’s been absolutely seamless so far.”
The Jeddah route, apart from the Saudi and UK expatriate traffic would open up a direct route on a UK airline for the 26,000 plus British Muslims who come to the Kingdom on Haj each year. Added to the extended Umrah season, the market offers some interesting commercial prospects. Jeddah’s rapidly developing position as the Kingdom’s business center would provide an extra fillip.
BMi is Britain’s second-largest full-service airline and has set out to enter the long-haul market by identifying 14 routes from Heathrow that it believes are ready for a new player.
Currently, about 10 percent of the airline’s business is long haul, the balance about equally divided between UK domestic and continental Europe. The long haul sector is, said Sir Michael, “a segment of the market which over the next seven years we will develop.”
In May of this year, Sir Michael observed that of the 82 airlines flying long haul to Heathrow, only two are British. “That cannot be right,” he said. BMi contends that fares would drop by at least 10 percent if new competitors were allowed on to long-haul routes. Many routes, however, are protected by trade barriers, such as the Bermuda 2 treaty, which restricts them to just a few airlines.
British Airways pulled out of its routes to the Kingdom earlier this year claiming that they withdrew “for commercial reasons.” BMi, said Sir Michael, had made its own assessment of the route and based on the commercial information they had, it was a very good sector for them. “We are operating a smaller aircraft than BA,” he said, “the Airbus 330. It’s the optimum size of aircraft to operate on a service such as this and it is a very good sector for the aircraft at six and a quarter hours.” The Airbus 330, with a capacity of about 300 seats, is the same type of aircraft that BMi operates on its award winning North Atlantic route. He was optimistic that the level of service as part of the package would be attractive to the premium market.
“I believe our cabin service and the three different types of services on the aircraft will be attractive to the potential customer. We believe that after a period to get established on this route that we will have a profitable operation.”
Largely seen in UK as a local and European airline, BMi has been operating scheduled services for 52 years. The airline was established before that in 1938. It has long experience of operating scheduled services not only in UK and in Europe, but long-haul charter flights which began in 1972.
“We actually first flew into the Kingdom when we were operating on behalf of Sudan Airways in the 1970s,” said Sir Michael. “We had a big business operating 707s then for newly developing airlines in Africa and the Middle East. We are familiar with the territory but this is our first service in our own name into the Kingdom.” The company operated an international airline leasing service to a number of carriers around the world between 1972 and 1986 — some in the Middle East, the Far East and Africa and won the Queen’s Award for Export Achievement in 1979.
