Airline News
Cathay traffic down, focus on Europe and A340 retirement
March 2nd 2015
Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific Airways and regional subsidiary, Dragonair, have reported disappointing passenger figures for January. The airlines carried 2,612,964 passengers, up 2.7% year-on-year for the month, but ASKs increased 7.3%. Read More » Passenger load factor dropped 0.7% to 82.7%. Cathay said it had been "impacted by the weakness in certain currencies, including the Euro, the Japanese yen and the Canadian and Australian dollars".
However, the airline’s cargo business – typically accounting for about a quarter of its total revenue – produced robust results. RTKs in January were up 14.1%, compared with a year earlier, beating a capacity increase of 8.9%. Last week, Cathay announced a twice-weekly B747 freighter service between Hong Kong and Kolkata, starting on March 11.
Meanwhile, Cathay Pacific chief executive, Ivan Chu, was optimistic about the carrier’s growth in his February chief executive message to the airline’s staff. He said 2014 was about expanding its presence in North America and “the next three years would be very much about building more strength in our other key long-haul market – Europe”. As such, Chu highlighted Cathay’s December launch to Manchester and its new services to Zurich (March 29) and Dusseldorf (September 1). As previously reported by This Week in Asia-Pacific Aviation, there is a longstanding rumour that Cathay will announce Hong Kong to Barcelona and/or Madrid this year.
In the meantime, Cathay has accelerated retirement of its 11-aircraft strong fleet of A340-300s. Together with three B747-400s, the first A340 was taken out of revenue service on February 28. Two more will go in May, and a further two will leave in September. The last frame is scheduled to be decommissioned in November 2017. For the first time, Cathay will use a part-out facility in Tarbes, France, to dismantle and dispose of the A340 fleet. The facility is less than 100 miles from where the four-engine long-haul jet was once built in Toulouse. The airline says “the A340 retirement presents the opportunity to recall large volumes of high-value parts common with the A330”.
