(I wrote the following before seeing the post above. Good to see I'm not the only one thinking along these lines.)
I’m surprised no one has touched upon the real ‘dark horse’ in the equation re time to command in EK – and that is that EK is no longer the only new player in ‘der Gulf’.
In what to any outsider seems to be a communal commercial death wish, the ruling families in each Emirate are flooding the (let’s face it) finite market of Gulf Aviation with an ever increasing number of new airlines. We’ve got Qatar Airways, Gulf Traveller (a ‘low cost’ all widebody offshoot of Gulf Air now based in Abu Dhabi), Etihad, (also based in Abu Dhabi), Arabia in Sharjah (all of 10 miles from Dubai), as well as the slightly longer established Oman Airways in Muscat.
Even the local Arab pilots are somewhat bemused, reverting to black humour. (It’s the UAE, right? – that’s ‘United Arab Emirates’. Well, Abu Dhabi has Itiad, [for the uninitiated ‘Itiad’ means ‘united’ in Arabic], Sharjah has Arabia, and Dubai has Emirates. So we are the ‘United’ Arab Emirates.)
Unfortunately, the ‘united’ part of the country’s name seems to be a misnomer, with Abu Dhabi (all of 70 miles from Dubai) seemingly hell bent on creating a larger airline than Dubai’s as quickly as possible. Sharjah’s ‘low cost’ Arabia is said to be creating a new market that will not infringe on Emirates’ existing market. (Just like Virgin Blue did in Australia. Yeah, right.) However, the latest ‘Flight International’ speaks of their plans to expand to 50 aircraft. The proverbial Blind Freddie could see that such an expansion will undoubtedly bite deeply into Emirates’ customer base, particularly within the region and to the Subcontinent.
Dubai is half way through building a very expensive new terminal underground on the existing airfield (space constraints, even after removing multiple homes and commercial properties for the runway extension dictate that down is the only way to go to fit everything into the very limited existing site). The extensive building works (to say nothing of the increasingly chaotic traffic situation on the roads to and from the airport) have the potential of, at the very least, delaying the desired expansion. (Yesterday morning’s fog should prove yet again how badly the airport needs an up and running Cat III ILS – highly unlikely in the short term with the taxiways in their current state.) I’ll leave unsaid what they could cause at the worst.
There’s a huge stretch of desert allocated for a new airfield at Jebel Ali, half way between Dubai and Abu Dhabi, quite close (maybe too close for some!) to the burgeoning 5 star tourist hotel ‘strip’. It doesn’t take an aviation or business genius to see that with just a hint of co-operation, a new, state-of-the-art airport that would be shared by Abu Dhabi and Dubai could – should – be built post haste at Jebel Ali. Nor does it take a genius to see that these many separate airlines in such a small area are a recipe for commercial disaster to most, if not all players in a not unlimited market.
Unless the unthinkable occurs and one of the new starts, in their race to expand too rapidly, suffers a hull loss that could knock them out of the race, the prize – commercial survival – will probably go to the airline whose owners have the deepest pockets. If that’s the case, the race will be between Qatar (Qatar Airways) and Abu Dhabi (Etihad), certainly not Dubai and Emirates.
So prospective applicants for a job with EK might like to factor this (in my opinion at least) rather large factor into their thinking.