I’m not sure WHY TC is following this strategy of being openly bullish and overly optimistic. EK has a history of being a market disruptor and going against convention in fleet choices, frequencies etc. and you have to admit they always made it work until now.
Reality is there will surely be a few leases that will expire in 2021 and 2022 so there goes dozen or so A380s. All of the sudden the whole fleet is ‘only’ 100.
You can technically have them all out of storage and ‘flying’ by end of the year with the crew they got albeit at a much lower utilization - a flight every 5 days per frame? And from there scale up.
Is that what he means? Does that make sense at all? So far they are using the opposite strategy with a small number of frams activated.
What’s clear is that EK wants to lead that eventual recovery. Their model is suddenly going to benefit them vs the point to point at the beginning plus they will need many frames to offer decent connection times to make their product attrative as said above.
Whilst is physically impossible to have all the crew back and current this year, I think they’ll slowly recall as they increase airframe utilization during the next 6 to 18 months or so.