Emirates Airline’s CEO, Tim Clark, says he is confident Airbus will not further delay delivery of its first A380 super-jumbo to the Dubai-based carrier, and that the plane maker will weather its current crisis.
In an interview with Reuters at the ITB tourism fair in Berlin, he said that he was confident that Airubs had made the right decisions to turn around the company, and get A380 production back on track.
“I am assuming there will not be a further delay to the A380,” he said. “Our teams were in the plants in Toulouse and Hamburg and have looked at production on site. We believe that Airbus is solving the problems,” he said.
Emirates, which is the biggest customer for the delayed A380 aircraft, expects to receive its first superjumbo in August 2008, Clark added.
Clark also played down the importance of compensation for the delayed A380 orders, though he expected the companies to reach an agreement soon.
In February, His Highness Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum, chairman of Emirates, told a Dubai TV station that he expected compensation to be more than 250 million Euros ($325 million). Anything less, he added at the time, would not be acceptable.
Clark, however, was relaxed about the compensation negotiation. “It won’t be a big deal though,” he said. “It is much more important for me that we now actually get the planes as planned than to get as high an amount of compensation as possible of so many hundred million dollars.”
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