Gulf Air saw an 11 per cent rise in its total freight business in 1999.THE CONTINUING renaissance of Gulf Air is raising eyebrows at Abu Dhabi International Airport (ADIA), where the carrier's freight volumes enjoyed a 20 per cent increase in 1999 and are set for another substantial rise this year.
Gulf Air's cargo volumes at ADIA rose to 44,233 tonnes last year, up from 35,342 tonnes in 1998, according to Gulf Air's Abu Dhabi-based senior cargo services and operations officer, Abdullah Al Shawoosh.
The government of Abu Dhabi is one of four equal partners in Gulf Air, the others being Bahrain, Oman and Qatar.
The airline's current president and CEO, Sheikh Ahmed bin Saif al-Nahyan, is a member of the powerful ruling family of Abu Dhabi, the largest of the seven federations of the United Arab Emirates.
The expansion of cargo handling capacity at the airport and increased non-oil industrial output in Abu Dhabi was responsible for the substantial rise in import cargo volumes, which grew by nearly 29 per cent to 24,080 tonnes in 1999, from 18,704 tonnes the previous year.
There was particularly strong growth in the last six months of the year, when nearly 22,000 tonnes of freight were handled through ADIA by Gulf Air, against about 19,000 tonnes for the same period of the previous year.
December was the busiest month with 2,230 tonnes handled, an increase of 32.3 per cent over December 1998.
There was similarly impressive improvement of more than 21 per cent in the volume of transit and joining cargo, which grew from 16,638 tonnes to 20,154 tonnes during 1999. The best month was February, which saw a rise of almost 50 per cent to 1,515 tonnes.
Gulf Air also launched a road feeder service last October, which, in the proceeding six months, handled 535 tonnes of cargo from Abu Dhabi to Dubai, and 597 tonnes from Dubai to Abu Dhabi.
The carrier's much improved volumes through ADIA are reflective of the 11 per cent rise in its total freight business, which crossed 150,000 tonnes in 1999, thanks partially to the economic revival in Asia.
This, in turn, is demonstrative of the extraordinary turn of fortunes enjoyed by Gulf Air since 1995, when questionable management practices plunged the airline into the red, to the tune of US$159 million.
A subsequent re-injection of capital from all four owner-governments provided Gulf Air with the impetus it needed to return to profit from 1997 onwards.
This enabled the airline to invest more than $550m in six new Airbus A330-200s, the last two of which arrived in the first quarter of this year.