Up, up and away as rejuvenated Aer Arann takes off
In little more than a year the airline has gone from uncertainty to a new dawn following the completion of a takeover by FTSE-listed company the Stobart Group and the signing of a long-term franchise deal with the Irish national carrier Aer Lingus.
The combined resource puts Aer Arann into an enviable position of financial stability and gives the company an opportunity to grow rather than stagnate, according to Simon Fagan, Aer Arann chief operating officer.
The airline celebrated the delivery of one of several new generation ATR 72-600 series aircraft to coincide with the first anniversary of the company’s Dublin-London Southend route recently and Mr Fagan predicted a bright future.
“Essentially,” he said, “it is a new beginning that commenced late last year with a significant piece of restructuring financially for the business; it put us on a platform now that we have a solid financial base from which to grow. There is support and expectation from the shareholders to do exactly that and the initial achievement was to agree and sign a 10-year franchise with Aer Lingus.
“It will allow us togrow to UK cities so the likes of Birmingham and Manchester and Glasgow will be like a shuttle service as such, with something around six services a day.
“Also, the transatlantic business is hugely important. A lot of UK airports don’t have direct transatlantic services, so rather than customers connecting in London or back hauling into Europe, we feel that Dublin has a unique proposition to offer customers; it’s very competitive on price, very competitive on elapsed time.
“In fact clients can be in the USA quicker and you need to calculate the full end-to-end journey,” said Mr Fagan pointing to the benefits of pre-immigration clearance to the US in Ireland.
“Transatlantic activity is growing for us with Aer Lingus now having two flights a day to New York, Boston and Chicago. Our job is to feed into that to make sure the connections are optimised.”
The benefits of a prosperous Aer Arann should also be seen in Cork and Shannon airports, with the promise of more deployment of aircraft as the fleet increases to 15, the majority of them brand new following a €145m deal struck for new equipment recently.
Mr Fagan said he would hope to add a third aircraft from next year to the two already based in Cork and add another to the one in Shannon.
He says Cork had been successful from day one and the airline now services Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, Bristol and Edinburgh as well as Jersey and Rennes in the peak season. “The Cork fleet is busy and our motivation is to work with Cork Airport to introduce a third unit there next summer.
“We’re evaluating all our business opportunities on an ongoing basis., We’re in the fortunate position that we have a number of potential new routes on the drawing board for Cork and I’m delighted to be in a position that I can task a third aircraft with a full line of flying from Cork so there will be more news about that in six months time.
“Our network is primarily the UK: the aircraft is designed for an hour and a half or two hour flight, we have some peak summer motivation to fly into France and maybe the Low Countries, but really the mainstay of the network growth would be to the UK,” he said.
That should be good news for both southern airports at a time when there has been a lot of doom and gloom. It’s also good news, of course, for the airline, as Mr Fagan explained: “At a time when a lot of European regional carriers are shrinking, we’re the opposite, we’re a beacon of light in the sense that we have good news and good opportunity; the pressure is that we must be energised as a team, but it is a nice place to be in at present.
“The company was at a place where quite frankly it was struggling from a cashflow perspective, but the solid restructuring and financial support from the shareholders and the strong relationship with Aer Lingus allows us to have a great platform to take the regional business to a new level of financial performance.”
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