Long term longhaul
...., and I have had the pleasure of speaking at length with JB too..., and he gave me a very different impression!
In his words...., "Why bust a gut to win a fare-war against 3 other carriers for increasingly smaller yields, from a catchment of only 22 million people? Why not increase our catchment to a potential billion people
( i.e LAX and AUH hubs) and bring our OWN passengers to feed our OWN domestic network, supported too by an increasing domestic corporate yield? All future growth ( in numbers, not yield) in domestic will ONLY be achieved by driving inbound passengers onto our domestic operation. Apart from alliances to help achieve this, I envision an expansion of our longhaul network".
Sounds very clever to me..., and gives me confidence that our (now) money-making longhaul operation will be around for a while yet.
In the meantime, I hope longhaul can continue to pay-back / support the domestic operation thru the changes and forthcoming EBA as they have supported the long haul start up operation.