Three new destinations on the schedule this year

In a dual expansion plan involving Qatar Airways Cargo and its parent company, Qatar Airways, the combined service is offering an ever-growing service package to the mining industry and other air cargo users. In an exclusive interview with FTW, Dileepa Wijesundera, senior vice-president of the cargo operation, noted that the 2009 expansion would be extended into 2010. The highlights of 2009, he said, “included the launch of flights to Houston, Texas, the addition of Amritsar in the northern state of Punjab, and Goa as the airline’s ninth and tenth destinations in India.” Probably the most noticeable addition of the year was on December 6 – a date which marked the launch of services to Melbourne in Australia, and added this island giant as a new continent in the network. “This,” Wijesundera said, “is an exciting prospect, and one that opens up opportunities for existing customers in Europe, UK, Africa and the Middle East, as well as presenting new customers out of Australia with access to the airline’s network.” Frequency increases have also played a major part in the expansion in 2009. This included additional flights to Athens, Paris, Stockholm, Zurich, Madrid, Lagos, Manila, Muscat, Kuala Lumpur, Algiers and Tunis. The Doha-based flag-carrying airline of Qatar is currently due to add three new destinations to its flight network in 2010. The information from Wijesundera revealed that daily flights to Bangalore in India would be launched in February, followed by a similar service to Ankara in Turkey and the Japanese capital of Tokyo in April. The addition of the Bangalore route will take the airline’s number of weekly flights to India to 71 across 11 cities. The daily service to Tokyo will be operated via Osaka and the Seoul service, which currently runs via Osaka, will become non-stop from the end of March. It is not just a route number and flight frequency expansion, according to Wijesundera – but aircraft additions are also part of the plan. “Qatar Airways confirmed an order for 24 Airbus A320 family aircraft at last year’s Paris Air Show,” he said, “and added them to the other 179 aircraft on order. “This included five Airbus A380 ‘super jumbos’ which are due to start arriving in 2011. We will also see three brand new Boeing 777 freighters joining our present cargo fleet of Airbus A300-600 freighters.” And SA is going to benefit from this busy growth programme, Wijesundera added, with Qatar Airways Cargo currently delivering to 87 destinations worldwide, but intended to increase to 120 destinations in the next five years.