These days, with the Dubai Air Show just up the road and Abu Dhabi’s new airline making major waves, the emirates’ aviation sector is seeing some boom times. More evidence of this came this week with the news that Abu Dhabi is about to get its own, local aircraft construction industry.
This will be in the form of the Gulf Aircraft Partnership (GAP). The company has been formed by the Gulf Aircraft Maintenance Company (Gamco) and the UK’s Farnborough Aircraft Corporation Ltd. (FACL). On November 22, GAP announced it had signed a memorandum of understanding to begin manufacturing and marketing the new Kestrel business aircraft in Abu Dhabi.
“We have sought $100m in finance from UAE Offset Group [UOG] for the project,” GAPS’s Geoffrey Galley told Gulf News in its November 23 edition. “We will then forge a joint venture among GAP, Gamco and UOG to develop the facilities and roll out the aircraft in phases.”
The Kestrel is a single engine turbo-prop which can travel at around 350 knots (950 kph) for journeys up to 1500 nautical miles. That gives it the range to reach Cairo or Delhi non-stop, Galley told reporters.
In addition, “It can land virtually anywhere, even on grass,” Galley said. “With high-speed and short landing and take offs, it is an ideal aircraft for the business travellers of this region.”
The airplane was designed in the UK, with Gamco involved in building its prototype. The idea is to use the company’s good technical infrastructure in Abu Dhabi, and its engineering shops in particular, to build the aircraft airframes. The target market is the Gulf, with plans to expand beyond there as time goes on.
Gamco was also in the news this week as speculation mounted over the future of the 40% stake in the company owned by Gulf Air.
The chairman of Abu Dhabi’s Etihad Airways, Sheikh Ahmad Bin Saif Al Nahyan, told reporters at the beginning of the week that “We are in negotiations with Gulf Air on acquiring their 40% stake in Gamco.”
He then added that the negotiations were at an early stage and that he did not know if the Abu Dhabi government might also try to purchase the Gulf Air stake.
The government withdrew earlier this year from Gulf Air, the regional carrier that started out equally owned by the governments of Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain. Qatar left in 2002.
The Abu Dhabi government owns the remaining 60% of Gamco, which has long had the contract with Gulf Air to serve as its maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) facility.
It is this that most analysts see as being the prize Etihad is after. A ready made MRO facility would be extremely useful for the airline, as it is expanding rapidly and is expected to carry 1.5m passengers this year, rising to 3.5m in 2006.
Given the speed of such expansion – some 20 aircraft are on order at present – purchasing an existing MRO facility would relieve the airline of the need to set one up from scratch on its own and in short order.
Yet it is not just on the maintenance front that Etihad has been making announcements in recent days.
With such a deluge of extra visitors expected, the airline is clearly also concerned with providing them somewhere to stay. Abu Dhabi currently has 8000 hotel rooms, which would be nowhere near enough to accommodate the expected influx.
The answer to this conundrum was provided on Tuesday by the Etihad chairman.
“We will invest in new hotel projects to serve tourists, as the emirate has a shortage of hotel rooms,” he told the press at the Dubai Air Show.
“About 10 hotels will be built in Abu Dhabi per year,” he continued, “and in 10 years time we will have 100 new hotels. In total we will add 10,000 hotel rooms.”
In particular, “A 300-room hotel will be build at the Abu Dhabi International Airport, as part of the overall redevelopment plan,” he said.
The emirate’s airport is currently undergoing a Dh25bn ($6.81bn) redevelopment. The Sheikh said that this was going well and that design for the second runway had been finalised and would be tendered soon.
Although it was left unclear whether or not Etihad would set up its own hotel management subdivision, there can be little doubt of the colossal impact the airline is having on Abu Dhabi. Its ambitious plans have not only given international airplane manufacturers a major boost, but the ripple effects from this are pushing out the boundaries in the emirate of both tourism and construction as well.
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