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Emirates aircraft line up during the morning rush at Dubai International Airport.
BERLIN—Emirates Airline President Tim Clark bemoans that a lack of traffic rights to India makes the country less important for the carrier as its global network continues to grow.
“We have been building [capacity] since 2015,” Clark told Aviation Week during a roundtable meeting March 5 in Berlin. “For 10 years we were not able to increase capacity to India; India therefore [became] less important to us.”
Clark says Emirates is making “good money” from overall expansion of its operations, “It’s a loss to India [that] Emirates is not able to expand operations there,” he says.
Clark suspects that since flag carrier Air India was privatized, Vistara merged in November with Air India, and LCC Indigo is expanding, the Indian government is trying to protect its national airlines in the global aviation market.
“Good luck to them,” he says. “You have 1.2 billion people in India; 300 million are part of the middle class. They want to travel.”
According to OAG travel data, Emirates operates 167 round-trip flights per week from Dubai to India. The destination schedule includes Mumbai (35 weekly), Delhi (28 weekly), Hyderabad (21 weekly), Chennai (21 weekly), Bengaluru (21 weekly), Kochi (14 weekly), Kolkata (11 weekly), Ahmedabad (nine weekly) and Thiruvananthapuram (daily).
Unlike India, many other nations have open sky agreements with the United Arab Emirates, Clark says. “We have full open sky with [Argentina]. The president [Javier Milei] told us, do whatever you want—just come,” Clark says.
“Our brand is highly regarded by lot of [South American] governments; they are very keen we should be in their countries,” Clark adds. He jokes that the only place left for Emirates to expand is the Moon.
Uplifting Partnerships
Speaking about cooperation with Star Alliance founding member United Airlines, Clark sees it as a very strong partnership, with United flying Boeing 777-200ERs from Newark to Dubai since March 2023 under a codesharing agreement.
“It is relatively early years at the moment,” Clark says. “I think [United CEO] Scott Kirby and his team [realize] that [with] all that we talked back in the gray days of the walls between us, they got a lot of volume out of cooperation.” He praises Kirby for bridge building with Star Alliance founder Lufthansa before partnering with Emirates. “It [took] some courage to do that,” Clark says.
Discussing the Emirates partnership with flydubai, Clark says they are “working well together,” despite being different brands and companies. Flydubai recently added three more destinations in Iran,” where Emirates’ aircraft are too big, he notes.
“Flydubai [brings] in much more to the superhub Dubai, heavy lifting in the lower segments, also with Boeing 787s in the future,” he says.
Superhub Strategy
Clark expects operations will start between 2032 and 2034 at Al Maktoum International Airport (Dubai World Central). “In early 2030, it will be ready,” he says. “But from completion, commissioning, testing, etc., it takes 1.5 years.” The UAE is investing $50 billion on the superhub, he says.
Meantime, at Dubai International Airport it is costing more to manage and accommodate increasing traffic, Clark says, adding that passenger traffic could increase to 120 million passengers. In 2024, Dubai International handled 92.3 million passengers.
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