Qatar Airways will not retire Boeing 777s from its fleet until the national carrier receives the long-range, wide-body, twin-engine 777X aircraft, group chief executive HE Akbar al-Baker has said.
“Boeing already said it will be late until 2021. I was expecting that it will be late, but not by that much,” al-Baker told reporters on the sidelines of the ‘2019 Trinity Forum’ at the St Regis Doha Wednesday.
“Our 777s are meant to replace our fleet. We want to keep growing, but want to make sure we are not growing our emissions too. This is why we are investing in state of the art aircraft like 777s,” al-Baker noted.
“What we have to do is to continue using our 777s a little bit longer instead of retiring them from our fleet,” al-Baker said.
He said the national carrier had seen “zero effect” on taking out the duty free from the aircraft.
“We are making profit–but that is only half of the fuel burn on account of our making room for the duty free products. And when we have to put duty free items on an aircraft, we have to reduce passenger offerings – because the duty free is occupying the space of items that we need to enhance the experience of our passengers. And we have everything available at the Hamad International Airport.”
Al-Baker said, “We feel that we are saving in excess of $10mn in fuel burn over a year in our fleet by not having the duty free.”