Emirates' airline hopes on wing and prayer
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — An opinion piece written by Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi about Canada's quarrel with the UAE over landing rights that appeared in the January 20 edition of the Globe and Mail is seriously misleading in several respects.
The article states that "hundreds of injured Canadian troops were given free medical care in the UAE before being airlifted home." This figure has deeply puzzled Canadian military and medical people in Kandahar and in Canada. The correct figure is not "hundreds." It is zero.
All of Canada's war injured from Kandahar have been treated at NATO hospitals and clinics in Afghanistan. Those requiring greater medical care have been transported in special flying hospitals by the U.S. Air Force to an American medical hospital in Germany where Canada has a small detachment of medical personnel. From there, when they were well enough to travel, these patients returned home.
But it is true that over the past eight years some of the soldiers that had been based at Canada's former logistical base in the UAE (Camp Mirage) were treated in that country when they became ill or were injured while loading and unloading aircraft or while maintaining transport aircraft.
Citing the BBC as a source, the sultan states that the UAE has also been the only Arab country conducting "full-scale operations" in Afghanistan. I'm not quite know what is meant by that term. Not one soldier from the UAE has been killed in Afghanistan, according to statistics kept by iCasualties.org. The only Arab soldier to die was a Jordanian. The same website states that 154 Canadians have died in Afghanistan.
The UAE does have a few fancy Apache attack helicopters based in Afghanistan. A standing joke among NATO air force crews is that they are rolled out of their hangars every morning to be polished and then they are rolled back in again. The general consensus is that these choppers almost never actually fly anywhere.
Whatever the UAE's military commitment to Afghanistan has cost, it is surely only a fraction of what Canada has spent here. By the end of this year Ottawa will have spent as much as $18 billion on the war on terror in Afghanistan, according to the parliamentary budget office.
Emirates Airlines and Etihad Airways, which are the UAE's two national carriers, have said that their requests for more access to Canadian airspace have been seriously overstated by the Canadian side. What they say they had sought were daily flights to Toronto and as many as six flights a week to Calgary and Vancouver.
So, it is somewhat confusing when the sultan's article cites a study by Emirates Airlines and the British Columbia Transportation Ministry that highlighted the benefits of the proposed increase in flights between both nations based on "275,000 annual passengers." To fly that many passengers would require at least two fully-loaded Emirates Airlines Boeing 777 jumbo jets a day between Dubai and Vancouver, not several flights a week.
This reference begs the question: What number of landing slots has the UAE actually been seeking from Canada?
As for the supposed economic benefits for both countries, the writer claims that they would run into the many hundreds of millions of dollars every year if additional landing rights were granted. Chamber of commerce types touting potential business benefits are often prone to gross exaggeration. From what I have seen on the flights that I have taken on Emirates Airlines between Dubai and Toronto, about 95 cent of the passengers were not Emiratis or Canadians or business types, but Indians and Pakistanis — mostly of modest means — intent of visiting kin, with a few Jordanian and Lebanese families also part of this mix.
The sultan cites U.S.-UAE trade figures which indicate that business between the two countries has tripled to $12.7 billion since Emirates Airlines began flying to New York in 2004. This data may be accurate, but my guess is that most of that increase has been the result of the U.S.-led war on terror. Much of the logistical support for the wars in Iraq and, especially, Afghanistan flows through the UAE. For example, virtually all of the food eaten by U.S. (and Canadian) troops in Afghanistan is bought around the Middle East and elsewhere and then gathered in Dubai and flown from there to here.
Trade statistics with the UAE are often misleading because so much of it involves "crossdecking" goods that were made elsewhere and are going elsewhere. The UAE imports finished goods and food, and exports virtually nothing made there, because almost nothing is made there. And many of those doing this work, or who have jobs in the construction and service industries, are cheap labour: South Asians, Filipinos, Africans and Egyptians who are never granted rights to permanently live there, let alone citizenship.
Sultan Al Qassemi also states that "the UAE has employed the same proactive approach with Canada that it has with other nations with regards to trade and tourism promotion when Etihad and Emirates launched direct flights to Toronto back in 2005 and 2007 respectively. Six years later, no Canadian airline has taken advantage of this growing market."
This is correct. Left unsaid is that the UAE has much greater access to the aviation markets in New Zealand and Australia for several years and not one carrier from those countries flies to the UAE, either. There is also a gross imbalance in flights from the UAE to Europe, with the two UAE carriers flying far more flights than European carriers do. Ditto for the U.S., where the difference is about a dozen flights a day by UAE carriers compared to two or three by American carriers.
The reasons for this are clear. Western carriers cannot compete against UAE carriers because they have generally had easier access to more generous credit arrangements to purchase aircraft, and employ cabin crew and ground crew including mechanics from Third World countries who are paid a fraction of what western airline workers get.
The other crucial factor that explains why so few western carriers can compete against carriers from the UAE in Dubai or Abu Dhabi is that the western carriers do not have direct access through Dubai to passengers from other Arab countries, or from the sub-continent, who make up the great majority of passengers for Emirates and Etihad. This is especially true for traffic bound for Canada and the U.S.
Canada is not the only country that has serious reservations about the UAE's aviation plans. Air carriers from Britain, France, the Netherlands and Germany have been up in arms for some time over demands by the UAE for even more traffic rights. The Koreans, too, are furious over the UAE's demands for more landing slots.
Germany has already had enough. It has just said no to Emirates Airlines' request for landing rights in Berlin and Stuttgart, sending the CEO of Emirates into a tizzy.
If readers were to check European web sites, such as Luchtzak Aviation, that follow the business closely, they would find experts there lauding Canada's stance and demanding that their countries follow Canada's lead.
As for the 27,000 Canadian expatriates that the article states are living in the UAE, at a guess about 1,000 of them work for Emirates Airlines and Etihad Airways as pilots. A relatively small number of those Canadians work in the oil industry, banking and telecoms. Most of the rest of the Canadian passport holders are of Indian and Pakistani descent who conduct most if not all of their business with the subcontinent, not with Canada.
Nevertheless, the sultan makes some good points. It is absolutely true that the UAE's ambassador to Canada has tried to see Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon for several years but has been unable to do so. Such behaviour by Cannon is totally unacceptable and has been deeply frustrating to Canadian diplomats working on many international files. They say the minister often seems barely interested in his portfolio and only wants to meet envoys who represent a small group of Canada's traditional allies.
Al Qassemi is also right about the UAE being a huge regional business hub and banking centre. But with so much business being conducted electronically today, and with neighbouring countries such as Bahrain and Qatar keen to provide similar services — to say nothing of economic powerhouses such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai — it is hardly an absolute necessity for Canadian businesses to establish themselves in the UAE.
The UAE's colossal global ambitions for its two airlines are understandable. It is blessed to lie between Asia and Europe and North America. Because of this it can provide one-stop service for travelers from Auckland, Brisbane, Peshawar or Hyderabad on their way to Newcastle, Toronto or San Francisco. But the great majority of the millions of passengers carried by the UAE's two carriers do not have any links to that country — which only has a little more than one million citizens — beyond the airplane tickets they have purchased. At the same time, airlines in the countries they are traveling to and from do not get any of their money.
The sheikdom's particular anger with Canada is also understandable. Emirates and Etihad have more than 200 wide-body jets on order and must find places to land them or they will be out tens of billions of dollars. That explains why it has been trying so loudly to get Canada to reverse its position.
If Ottawa maintains its principled stance, even more western countries may follow its lead, as Germany just has. That would be a nightmare for the tiny Gulf state's declared ambition to rule the skies.