Aviation

Flyadeal to confirm wide-body order by year end

November 20, 2024, 6:09 PM

Flyadeal fleet — Flyadeal wants 100 aircraft in its fleet by 2030

Flyadeal targeting 100-strong fleet
Wide-body craft for long-haul market
Mix of new and repurposed planes

Saudi Arabia’s low-cost airline Flyadeal is set to make a decision on its wide-body aircraft order before the end of the year, with up to 15 planes potentially joining its fleet.

CEO Steven Greenway confirmed on Wednesday that the order will be made up of repurposed 787s from parent company Saudia or brand-new aircraft from French manufacturer Airbus.

He said it had been exploring all options over the past six months, including “looking at all the different engine types, particularly given what’s going on in the market around engines and reliability.”

“We’re now coming to the end of that and hope to place an order before the end of the year.”

By the end of the year Flyadeal will have a fleet of 38 aircraft, and has plans to grow to 88 within the next three years, made up of a mix of A320s, which Greenway said was its “baseline aircraft”.

In May this year Flyadeal placed its biggest order for 51 Airbus A320 family aircraft, including 12 further A320neos, with a delivery schedule beginning in 2026.

The overall goal is to reach 100 aircraft in its fleet by 2030.

Wide-body aircraft orders, designed to help Flyadeal expand into the long haul market, are over and above this total.

Greenway said it would initially order around 10 to 15 wide-bodies.

The order will not, however, include aircraft from Chinese disruptor Comac, whose chairman Dongfeng He visited Saudi Arabia earlier this year for talks with officials about manufacturing aircraft.

He also pitched Comac’s small and medium-body planes as a potential part of the kingdom’s aviation plans.

But Greenway said a move to bring the manufacturer on board at this stage would be “very risky” for the carrier.

“I think like we saw with [Brazilian manufacture] Embraer, which started off in Latin America and built that support network and fleet and then went global, I suspect that ’s what will happen with Comac.

“We’ve already seen that with order books, that the aircraft will get more experience within China, then Asia, then worldwide. But that’s 10 years away,” he said.

“We need solutions in the next couple of years, not in five or 10 years’ time, particularly with an unproven model.”

Flyadeal operates from bases in Jeddah, Riyadh and Dammam to a domestic and international route network covering almost 30 destinations across Saudi Arabia, Middle East, Europe and North Africa.

The carrier reported a 5 percent year on year rise in seat capacity in August. The available seating capacity reached more than 5 million in the first half of 2024.