Meet those airmen who are bending the rules

by Yeoh Siew Hoon

I always feel slightly shy when I am in a room full of men and their flying machines, and the only women in sight are usually the flight attendants there to either walk them up to the stage to accept some award or to show off some new product or other.

It’s a bit like the automotive business, I suppose. The only women you see are usually the ones draped around cars. I have never understood that but I guess it makes the buyer think that his chances of getting such a woman will be enhanced if he buys a particular car model.

Anyway, airline men are very serious people.

I guess they have to be. They run billion-dollar businesses although you couldn’t say the same about their profits, they are responsible for the safety of millions and millions of people, they enable most of the world’s tourism and trade and they also emit a lot of stuff into the air which is making a lot of people very nervous these days with all the renewed attention on climate change.

But the regional aviation industry in Asia has gotten more interesting of late with niche players coming into the market and bending (slightly) the rules.

Take Datuk Tony Fernandes of AirAsia, possibly the first rebel to set out to prove that “now everyone can fly”.

His airline has grown so big now that Fernandes is no longer seen as the outsider. It has expanded to Thailand, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Bangladesh.

To get to where he is, from its set-up in December 12, 2001, Fernandes had had to fight every inch of the way. And right now, what he is fighting for are better LCC facilities at airports in the region. In particular, he cited Hong Kong as being too skewed towards traditional carriers.

He is very happy, of course, with the new Low-Cost Carrier Terminal-KLIA in Sepang, Malaysia.

What would make him happier would be if the Malaysian and Singapore governments liberalise their air agreements, which would allow him and other low cost players to fly between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore.

Tony Davis, CEO of Tiger Airways, whose airline won the Low Cost Airline of the Year from CAPA last year, also makes no bones about his desire to fly to Kuala Lumpur.

Davis meanwhile thinks the airline business could learn from cinemas. “You buy a ticket but look at what they charge you for popcorn and all the other stuff. I don’t mind selling you a cheap ticket but I want to charge you for all the other stuff too.”

I also know what Lim Kim Hai, executive chairman of REX Regional Express, thinks of GDSs. He thinks they are too expensive and make more money on the tickets they sell than he does. His airline now does 65 per cent direct online distribution, with the rest coming from Sabre, and he wants to go 100 per cent direct.

“Every airline has to find its own model and for a regional Australian airline, the GDS model does not work,” he said.

He also said he was shocked the first year he went into the business – after the collapse of Ansett, Lim and a few partners saw the opportunity for a regional airline and bought the Hazelton and Kendell turbo-prop passenger airlines businesses to form REX, now the largest independent airline in Australia.

“We went in naïve. We learnt how disastrous the airline business is, and we were shocked at how the airline could lose 30% of turnover in a year. So after year one, we ran it ourselves even though we had no expertise. We ran it like a business instead of an airline.”

What I was curious about was to find out if these airmen see the emergence of themed airlines in the future – an all-male airline, perhaps or an all-female airline; or a designer airline aimed at the pink dollar? After all, that’s how the hospitality industry is evolving.

SilkAir’s CEO Mike Barclay doesn’t think so. “There have been a few efforts in the US to start themed airlines but I don’t think they have worked. They are very attractive to look at but not very successful.”

Last year, a German entrepreneur announced plans to launch the world’s first smokers’ airline to fly from Dusseldorf to Tokyo. He was planning to call it SMINTAIR – Smoker’s International Airways.

A check on its website, SMINTAIR, shows a posting made October 17, 2006, saying “the inability of AIRBUS INDUSTRIES to deliver A380 aircraft as substitutes for all airlines’ current fleet of B747-400s, postpones the delivery of SMINTAIR’s B747-400s and consequently the first scheduled flight to October 2007, the beginning of the Winter Flight Plan”.

A further check this week indicated that SMINTAIR will launch today, March 15, confounding those analysts who said the airline would go up in a puff of smoke.