Egypt Air plans to buy 12 aircraft

Vancouver: Egypt Air plans to purchase about a dozen wide-bodied aircraft in the next few weeks, its chairman said.

The Cairo-based carrier is considering either the Boeing 777 or the Airbus A330, said Atef Abdul Hamid, said on Tuesday on the sidelines of an aviation conference in Vancouver. Although each plane is offered in multiple configurations, an order of that size could cost over $2 billion.

"Our plan is to have 64 aircraft by the end of 2010, which would be a doubling of our fleet since 2002," Hamid said. At the end of this year, the airline's fleet will consist of 50 planes.

Egypt Air, which operates more than 400 flights a week to 94 destinations in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and Australia, saw passenger traffic grow by 12 per cent last year, to 5.8 million.