A321NEO TO BE AIRASIA’S BACKBONE
New aircraft to be deployed on popular routes, says Fernandes
AIRBUS’ latest singleaisle aircraft, the A321neo, is set to become AirAsia Group Bhd’s backbone for its future operations.
AirAsia group chief executive officer Tan Sri Tony Fernandes said the new aircraft would be deployed on popular routes, delivering growth opportunities to new markets and adding extra capacity in existing markets.
“These are the markets with expansion constraints due to infrastructure or slot availability limitations,” he said at the welcoming ceremony of A321neo, here, yesterday.
Fernandes is also positive about AirAsia’s outlook next year, citing that there are more than one billion people in Asia.
“Most of them have not flown. We see the full-service carriers are trying to compete with the low-cost carriers and that caused overcapacity in some routes and fare dumping.
“We have to build capacity to fit that market. There is a huge amount of growth, but in terms of the overall capacity, maybe some of the airlines try to be low-cost, which caused fare dumping.”
Fernandes said the aircraft was the first of 353 A321neos on order by the group that would eventually replace the existing fleet of A320 and A320neo throughout its network covering Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, India and Japan.
AirAsia’s A321 order programme is expected to complete within six years to replace its A320 orders.
The A321neo has about 27 per cent increase in seat capacity, compared with AirAsia’s A320 (180 seats) and A320neo (186 seats).
Present at the event yesterday were Tourism, Arts and Culture Minister Datuk Mohamaddin Ketapi and AirAsia’s senior management team.
Mohamaddin said the new generation aircraft would enable the low-cost carrier to further boost air connectivity to and from Malaysia ahead of Visit Malaysia 2020.