A small desert nation, with nothing but oil, started as a small time airline, by leasing a couple aircrafts from other airlines, began its venture in the flying business.
No one could ever imagine then that it would spoil the party for the giants like British Airways, Lufthansa, Qantas, American Airlines and so on. Emirates is one of the few airlines in the world to solely operate wide bodied, twin aisle aircrafts in their entire fleet for the regular passenger flights. Perhaps in modern day time, it is the only airlines running a successful flying business with profits and still expanding at an exponential pace.
Today Emirates is the worlds leading airline, transferring the highest number of international passengers. Their home airport, the Dubai International Airport (DXB), is operated 24 hours round the clock where they send their flights packed all round the world.
During the night, when the North American and European airport are sleeping (thanx to the locals who don`t allow the flights to take-off and land there during nights) Emirates silently packs and blasts almost 200 heavy bodies out of Dubai. And they fly back to Dubai by the end of the day. What American and European airport can`t achieve with even 5 runways, this Dubai airport is possible to achieve using just 2 runways, by operating 24 hours round the clock.
What makes the Emirates this big ??
The most important aspect of Emirates is the location of their hub, it is literally at the center of the earth, it is at the cross-roads of the world. Secondly, it has more oil than any other part of the world. Thirdly the Dubai rulers have shown keen interest in starting, expanding and supporting this venture. Today, Emirates operates only wide bodied aircrafts, which have longer range and are more fuel efficient, this enables them to operate flights to smaller distances like Mumbai, to the medium haul distance like London, long haul distances to Sydney and the ultra long haul distance to Los Angeles, which is almost 16 hours of flying over the poles.
Dubai is located strategically at a point where it has become an important transit hub where there are connection routes to transfer people between
-Asia and North America
-Indian Sub-continent and Europe
-Europe and Australia-New-Zealand
-South America and China
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...
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Almost every un-imaginable connection is possible, from this one place and we call it
"Majestic DUBAI"
Emirates Fleet
The Emirates fleet consists of wide-bodied aircraft, including the Airbus A330, Airbus A340, Airbus A380 and Boeing 777, as well as Boeing 747-400 freighters operated by Emirates SkyCargo. The only narrow-body aircraft is an Airbus A319CJ which is being operated by Emirates Executive charters. Emirates operates the world`s largest fleet of Boeing 777s and the Airbus A380s. The B777 and the A380 both have been the main reason behind the hidden success of this young airline. At this point, it has over 200 aircrafts in operation and over 300 aircrafts on order, which means, there shall be a time where there will be almost 500 Emirates flights zooming around the world.
Emirates Threat
The airline is by all means cannibalizing all possible flying routes by offering better service at a lower price. It is the undisputed choice amongst business travelers and first class travelers. Once an interviewer asked, where will they deploy their new aircrafts after USA looked to decline them more landing right, to this the airlines officials answered saying that, if they weren`t allowed more rights to fly to that country, they`d simply return all the Boeing crafts back, there could not have been a bolder response to this. Similar had been the case when the Europeans thought of declining them more landing rights and they politely cancelled order of 70 aircraft of Airbus A350-XWB. Literally there is no stopping to this airlines, they have lesser words and more of action.
Futur-ama
They have already carved a niche in the global aviation sector. Now they are in process of constructing a new airport, The Al Maktoum International Airport, which on completion will have 5 parallel runways, and tons of gates, and all the Emirates operations will be shifted to this new airport and the existing Dubai airport will become the hub for Flydubai, the low cost carrier.
With the Al Maktoum Airport, they will be able to manage an impossible 1.5 million flight movements annually, and manage almost 200 million passengers, which is more than double of what Atlanta`s Hartsfield–Jackson airport(world busiest airport at this point) can manage today.
May be in the year 2025 I would write how poorly the Atlanta Airport is doing that moment...
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