Despite love and hate, National Carrier is a must-have for its economy: SriLankan CEO

By Sanath Nanayakkare

National airlines are usually the most loved and the most criticised operation in many countries and Sri Lanka is a clear example for this, Richard Nuttall, the Chief Executive Officer at Sri Lankan Airlines said at the Aviation College in Katunayake recently.

He said so while delivering the keynote speech at a workshop held for a group of media personnel who write, broadcast and telecast aviation news for their respective media organisations.

The two-day media workshop no doubt helped create more understanding of the aviation industry and why it’s important, and even more so how the National Carrier best serves its passengers and contributes to the economy despite having to deal with ill-considered and uninformed comments made in the main stream media and social media platforms.

“If you do a survey, you will find that the most favorite airline is the most hated airline at the same time, which is true for Sri Lanka too. Sri Lankans are in a state of having two opposing feelings at the same about the National Carrier, or are uncertain about how they should feel about it,” he said.

Richard Nuttall

Further speaking SriLankan CEO said,” Most often what is get reported is about ‘I had to wait an hour at the airport, or a flight turned back due to technical fault, but the reality is we are carrying 5 million passengers a year, and when you have 5 million passengers a year, it means 1,500 passengers through 15 desks in an hour. Such trivial things happen everywhere in the world and there are lot worse places in terms of such occurrences. Everywhere you would see a flight turning back or something happens on a flight and the airline says,” we don’t continue and we need to go back to base’. If you Google and search, you will find that it happens to any carrier in the world. So, what we want is to let the conversation move beyond instead of talking about small things; how we handle 5 million passengers a year on thousands of flights to many destinations. For example, if a Hajj pilgrim at the end of his life unfortunately passes away on a flight, it is not news. It is a general incident. This is why we want to lift the conversation and the understanding to a different level and see whether we could get the people who are really interested in aviation to see how the industry works so that we can have more informed views about the big picture of the industry. Aviation is a very complex business and it requires a lot of commitment and many, many skills. Sri Lankan Airlines has many personnel with a huge amount of training. For example, it takes years of hard work to become a pilot. It takes years to become an engineer. Like everybody else, we have IT experts, accounting professionals etc. We have about 100 IT systems integrated into our operational system. We have personnel who do revenue management, who set prices and plan where the aircrafts go. In addition, we have Catering, Ground Services and we provide maintenance for other carriers. Some of them stay with SriLankan for longer periods and others choose to work for other airlines. So, this is a huge, complex industry and SriLankan Airlines is a big company. We are highly regulated and we need to get permission from various governments where we arrive. And we need to operate in compliance with the safety protocols of not only the Civil Aviation Authority in Sri Lanka but also of civil aviation authorities from across the world. Everything we do in flying and on the ground is regulated and if we don’t follow these procedures, we might not be allowed to fly to Europe tomorrow. So it is more important to have an understanding of how SriLankan Airlines maintain these highest standards rather than anything else.”

“Aviation is probably worth about 5-6% of GDP for most countries and if we didn’t have aviation, that contribution wouldn’t be there. We employ 6,000 people. Around the ecosystem, there are many other people employed in civil aviation, in airports, as travel agents, as cargo agents etc. Hotels and tourism industry which directly and indirectly supports 10% of the population wouldn’t be able to operate if we didn’t engage in connectivity. If you look around the world at strongest economies, they all have a strong airline. What’s the hub in the Middle East? It’s Dubai and it grew on the back of Emirates. Etihad, Qatar, Saudi Arabia flights go there and their economy is driven hand in hand with Emirates. The financial centres of the world such as London, Frankfurt, Singapore, Hong Kong, and New York, all have major airlines based there with flights going in all directions. All regional airline offices in Africa are based in Nairobi. Kenya Airways is based in Nairobi. So aviation and airlines are really, really critical to any given country’s economy, businesses and tourism. This is why countries need to have strong airlines and all the reasons for having a strong national carrier for those important networks to work seamlessly. Today SriLankan flies to 35 destinations and as a ‘oneworld member’, we connect to hundreds of destinations across the world. How many people in this country have connections with Australia? If we don’t have an airline based here, nobody would fly nonstop to Australia. The reason for that is those flights are filled with 40% of the passengers coming from India. If we didn’t fly to Australia and didn’t fly to South East Asia maybe 50% of the flights that we fly on Indian routes won’t be there. There are so many people who say that if SriLankan is not there, somebody else will carry that route. That’s not correct. If you get somebody else to fly on maybe 30% of the routes, you just have to go via somewhere else and you will end up paying a lot more airfare. So if you want to build an aviation hub here, grow your tourism, scale up your industries, you have to have a strong national carrier.”