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30.07.2020 4 INTERVIEW Malta Air confident it can restore local BusinessToday met with Malta Air CEO Diarmuid O'Conghaile to discuss the airline's expectations in a post-coronavirus world, and its plans to bring tourists back to the island MASSIMO COSTA Malta Air launched in June 2019, as a Ryanair subsidiary based in Malta. At the time, Malta Air's plan was to incorporate within it all Ryanair routes to and from Malta, to add new routes and to increase its fleet. Earlier this year, the world was hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has had a major impact on aviation. What are the prospects for the industry post-coronavirus? COVID-19 has been catastrophic for the aviation industry. In the case of the Ryanair group, during the pandemic we went from 100% capacity to 1% ca- pacity within a period of two to three weeks. Ryanair is now back to around 40- 50% of capacity, and we expect this to rise to 60-70% in August. So, we're gradually ramping back up. In terms of the industry in general, we think it will take a few years for it to return to where it was before the coronavirus. We believe that passenger volumes, however, can recover quick- er than this. And the way Ryanair will achieve such a recovery in passenger volumes is by pricing fares very cheap- ly. Our goal is always to fill our aircraft. Right now, because of the very unu- sual circumstances, we're not doing this. Normally, we'd have load factors of 95-100%. We're not seeing that yet, at the moment, but, from when we started reopening flights from 1 July to now, load factors are increasing, and we expect them to continue to grow. In August, in fact, we expect the load factors to reach 70%. is indicates that demand is returning, and we're in fact seeing strong bookings into Malta, from a range of different areas, includ- ing the UK. We aim to sell cheap seats to fill our planes. rough Malta Air and the Ryanair group, next month we will be bringing in around 17,000 passengers to Malta every week. at's over half the num- ber we were bringing in August 2019. Our target for summer 2021 – which lasts from April to October – is to carry around one million arriving passengers into Malta. is is roughly the number we brought to the island in 2019 – our target is to equal this. And doing this will take cheaper fare – this is what we intend to do. Because fares are cheaper, we've had to cut costs. roughout the network, pilots have taken a salary cut of 20%. ese pay cuts have allowed us to avoid redundancies. In May, it was reported that Malta Air would be making around 60 cabin crew and pilots redundant due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Was this ultimately avoided? We did have a redundancy process in place, but we were able to cut costs without having to let go of employ- ees. ey were ultimately retained. I should highlight, however, that there is no guarantee about jobs, because we do not know what could happen in the winter when it comes to the vi- rus. roughout the network, we've decided to make pay cuts and hold on to staff. is isn't an absolute guaran- tee, but for the time being we will keep staff. We haven't made anyone redundant to date, despite the fact that around 300,000 redundancies have been an- nounced in the aviation sector. How- ever, unfortunately there is currently a difficult situation in our German bas- es, which are run by Malta Air. We're in negotiations with pilots in Germa- ny, but we might have to make some redundancies in the next days if an agreement isn't found. I'm hopeful that we won't have to make that step. Have Malta Air's plans for Malta been impacted by the virus? e plans which we announced in June 2019 have been delivered. We said at the time we'd put 50 or 60 air- At this stage, we are confident that Malta Air is the airline which can restore passenger traffic volumes to Malta. All other airlines are cutting their capacity, including Air Malta, EasyJet, Lufthansa, Air France and KLM. On the other hand, we're committed to retaining capacity, and we're the ones who can deliver the growth for Malta

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