surprisingly,that's good to hear but at the same time,no one would be ready to commit to this airbus 330 lease back transaction since the aircraft are set to be retired 4 years from now.This deal mainly catches interest if the aircraft is fairly new but it tends to fall apart if the aircraft is close to its retirement age.It is a good cost effective idea since it looks good on the balance sheet and has other useful advantages that may not hurt the carrier .But as always,the price expectation is much higher from Gulf Air's side which made the 340 so unattractive.That being said,I hope that you have conceptualized the fact that the carrier will remain since top Bahraini officials have gone out of their way to ensure that the carrier would continue to exist even though it was much easier to hit the reset button.The airline is being captained by a certain well known consultant group while the acting CEO is placed to stabilize and root out the internal political corruption which has always been the root cause of the failure of every semi solid strategy that Gulf Air has gone through in the past decade.I believe that I have spilled too much information for now but my main purpose is to stress on the fact that the current plan seem to be more solid and from what I can tell,there will not be anymore redundancy schemes in a long time.
That being said,don't expect any major expansion plans to take place until the end of the decade.