Air New Zealand, Chief Customer & Sales Officer, Leanne Geraghty at the CAPA Australia Pacific Aviation Summit 2024
Air New Zealand, Chief Customer & Sales Officer, Leanne Geraghty spoke to CAPA TV at the CAPA Australia Pacific Aviation Summit 2024, in Brisbane, about latest industry trends and company developments.
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Transcript
Leanne Geraghty:Air New Zealand's been quite impacted by multiple issues with our aircraft engines. So Pratt Whitney on our narrowbody fleet, the Trent 1000s, Rolls-Royce engines on our 787 fleet. We've been navigating through that for some time now, and we do expect that headwind to be around for another 12 to 18 months. But we have brought in 3 777-300 lease aircraft. We've made schedule adjustments, and really core to what we're doing is ensuring that our customers have surety and we build operational resilience into the schedule that we're putting out there for sale. Sustainability and hitting our sustainability objectives is really core to Air New Zealand. It's very near and dear to our heart, and we're super excited to have the Beta Alia aircraft, which is a CTOL aircraft, coming into market to do some demonstrator flying at the beginning of next year, of FY25 or calendar year '25. That will be operating on a cargo basis, so carrying NZ Post between Wellington and Marlborough, and we're really, really excited to get the learnings from that flying so that we can look to apply those to future next-gen aircraft that we may want to bring into the fleet. Given the delay to the delivery of our Boeing, our new Boeing 787 aircraft, we're very keen to get our new cabin interiors up into the sky and available to our customers. So we're actually putting our first 787 aircraft in the existing fleet in for retrofit from October. And so that will come out with the brand new cabin interior January of 2025, and we'll get that back into the schedule. And we've got an extensive retrofit programme which will see all of our 787 fleet fully retrofitted with the new product by the end of 2026. North America is an incredibly important part of the Air New Zealand network, and over the past 12 months we've seen the most significant capacity increase I think that has ever occurred from North America into New Zealand that I can remember in my 30 years of aviation. So a lot of seats added to market. The demand didn't keep up with the number of seats that were added in, and we've started to see some carriers moderate their flying into New Zealand and in fact across Australia as well. So it's really interesting. We do think that things will stabilise and we'll see some normalisation of capacity over the coming 12 months beyond what's already occurred.
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