Emirates launches distress services

Dubai: Emirates airline will continue to move stranded passengers to Europe despite the unpredictable movement of the ash cloud and additional volcanic activity in Iceland, a top official said.

"We have been looking at mounting extra sections, including A380 special services where we will activate all the fleet that we have," Emirates president Tim Clark said during a media briefing yesterday.

He said the flights would go to bases such as Heathrow, Frankfurt and Rome "just as soon as the window of opportunity opens to us".

The airline currently has 35,000 passengers stranded in Europe, while about 3,800 are still in Dubai. Clark said the airlines accommodated up to 6,000 passengers in hotels in Dubai, the airline's base where 20 per cent of its fleet is grounded.

The airline yesterday flew an A380 service to Paris as Charles de Gaulle airport opened during the day. It had also planned to fly to the United Kingdom and rest of Europe on Monday as "large areas of air space were opening up" but it had to cancel all flights to UK and re-route other European flights to Vienna and Zurich, after the volcano erupted in Iceland again, Clark said.

Losing $10 million (Dh36.7 million) a day in passenger revenues, the airline will be able to return to normal operations within three to five days if air spaces are kept open.

"But the longer it goes on, the worse it becomes and the longer we'll need to sort out the problems," he said. Clark said that the airline will not try to increase fares once the situation improves or try to take advantage of it. He said the airline still operates on other routes around the world profitably and will recover losses in due course.

"After any crisis, we've always managed to get back in good shape, and fairly quickly," he said.

Meanwhile, he said the airline would not ask the government for help or to be compensated for the disruptions.

However, he said that if the situation continues for much longer time, European airlines, which are facing a much greater impact from the air spaces being shutdown, will find themselves in serious trouble.

"You will see an implosion in the civil aviation industry, particularly in Europe," he said. "Unless the states in Europe come up and bail those companies out, there won't be many carriers left on that bases. You simply can't afford to shut down the size of Europe [for that long with complaints]," Clark said.

He said the aviation industry as a whole would learn a huge lesson from the situation and learn to deal with such situations in a better way in the future.

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