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Cathay Pacific
eyes Hawaii-
Hong Kong service
The airline is resuming
From staff and wire reports
its expansion programCathay Pacific Airways Ltd. says it may start a Hong Kong-Honolulu service.
The Hong Kong-based airline said it is resuming an expansion program that it dropped in 1997 at the height of the Asian financial crisis. It plans to buy new aircraft and introduce new destinations, aiming to boost the number of passengers it carries to 20 million a year from the current 12 million within a few years, said CEO David Turnbull.
Cathay Pacific returned to profit in the first half of 1999, following its first unprofitable year since 1963. The company's return to profit was driven in part by a cost-cutting campaign that is now almost complete. It now needs to expand to increase profits.
"Business -- there will be plenty of it," Turnbull said in a speech to the Aerospace Forum, a Hong Kong aviation industry group. "Profits, that's up to us."
Turnbull said the airline industry is turning into a commodity business and that the Asian airline industry's profitability per mile flown, which fell 25 to 30 percent during the economic crisis, "will not go back" to what it was.
Cathay wants to add enough additional capacity to fly to every major Asian city several times a day, so that a traveler can turn up at an airport and not wait more than two or three hours for a flight within the region, he said. The company may also add new destinations and is looking at the feasibility of adding routes to Tehran, Riyadh, Cairo, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates and the United States, including a possible service to Hawaii.
Bloomberg News contributed to this story. >
