airBaltic CEO Update
airBaltic Chairman & CEO, Martin Gauss, provides insights on the airline’s turnaround and its forecast for 2017. He underlines the attraction of the CSeries aircraft and the airline’s decision to operate only this aircraft from 2020.
Transcript
Martin Gauss:The biggest hurdle now after 5 years of doing the turnaround was actually the restriction not to grow because of the limitations when everybody else was growing. So that was the biggest hurdle because now we see the success of growing. So that, I would say, was the biggest hurdle. Our forecast is that we will exceed by far our own expectations because we were growing faster than we thought. So it will be the record year for airBaltic. for airBaltic 2017. The final numbers, of course, we need to go another 2 months, November, December, but we were very pleased. It's a great difference. The passengers love it, the crew love it, we love it. Each time it takes off, we are saving money. Our biggest issue with it, we are not having enough yet of them to get the full benefit. So we are very happy, 1 year in operation now, and we are using it intensive, and it is our future vehicle. We decided strategically that we want to go for a homogeneous fleet, which will be the CSeries, and we will be replacing the turboprop fleet also with CSeries, to then starting in 2020, we want to have only CS300 as an aircraft. Thank you, Martin.
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