Latvian national airBaltic airline still needs to lease other airline’s aircraft because the situation with engines is less than desirable, airBaltic CEO Martin Gauss told LETA in an interview.
He added that the general “wet lease” or the number of aircraft leased from other companies in the short term was 14 in 2023.
“This isn’t great, but the reason for this wasn’t that we had given away our aircraft to someone else, rather it’s because we received less engines than we were promised before,” Gauss said.
He noted that the situation has improved because airBaltic access to two spare engines.
“There are no problems during the winter flight season because many aircraft undergo maintenance, so they have no need for new engines. Forecasts suggest we will see a shortage of more than 10 engines during summer,” Gauss said.
He said that so far airBaltic has signed contracts for only two aircraft owned by other airlines. These aircraft will be deployed on routes used by airBaltic because now the company has more aircraft to use. At the same time, airBaltic has ordered more aircraft to increase the airline’s fleet to 80 and later to 100 Airbus A220 aircraft.
Gauss said currently airBaltic has 46 Airbus A220 aircraft. The airline plans to receive four more by the end of the year.
“The questions is why are we leasing our own aircraft to someone else in this situation? This is part of our business model. We sign contracts like that year after year, and if we leave this market, someone else will take our place,” said Gauss.
At the same time, he added that last year there was an exceptional situation and it was caused by a shortage of engines. But this year the airline has signed contracts for two aircraft in total. This means only some of airBaltic’s passengers could end up flying in one of those aircraft, adding that most passengers will be carried by Airbus A220 model aircraft.
Commenting the cause behind the shortage of engines, he said aircraft engines have a limited operational capacity.
“Once an engine reaches it’s limit, we remove it, package it and send it away for maintenance, which usually takes 90 days. During this time we use our spare engines. So what happened? The engines we had sent away for maintenance during Covid-19 pandemic were not returned on time. They didn’t return after 90 days, 100 days or 200 days. One engine failed to return after 389 days,” added Gauss.
He also said all of this piled on in the end, but airlines still have to fly. “If I’m not mistaken, this year around 600 Airbus A220 aircraft will remain grounded this year because of various engine troubles. All of this was caused by a shortage of spare parts or workforce, which considerably slowed engine maintenance,” said Gauss.
At the same time, the airBaltic CEO adds that the aviation industry did not previously take into account the possibility that maintenance of a single engine could require a whole year. No one expected such a situation to appear.
“We resolved this problem by leasing other airlines’ aircraft instead of cancelling flights. We believe this was the right call,” said Gauss.
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