00:00Well, Flyadeal is a Saudi Arabian low-cost airline, which is headquartered there in Jeddah,
00:05and it happens to be the fastest-growing airline in the Middle East, where we caught up with the
00:09CEO of Flyadeal, Stephen Greenaway, who confirmed that 2026 is off to a flying start. Here are some
00:16excerpts from that interview. Our capacity for January was up 37% year-on-year, which is huge.
00:23You know, we're not a small airline. We're not a huge airline, but we're not a small one either.
00:26We'll have 44 aircraft. Our 45th arrives on Monday next week. Just to give you a comparison,
00:31that was 300,000 extra seats year-on-year just for the month of January alone that we were flying
00:35that we didn't fly last year. So it is booming. And Jeddah is interesting. It's the second airport
00:41of Riyadh. It's the primary airport, but it's actually bigger than Riyadh. And a lot of it
00:45has to do with the traffic mix. We have a lot of pilgrims coming into Jeddah, and that boosts
00:50the numbers up over Riyadh.
00:52Okay, so you've got that cadet training program in Saudi Arabia. I mean, that does suggest,
00:57doesn't it? And everyone talks about a shortage of pilots in the open market. Is that something
01:01you're struggling with? Difficult to recruit pilots?
01:03It's real for the rest of the world. So for me, I get asked quite a lot, and we don't
01:07have a
01:07shortage at all. So as I said, we have quite a good pipeline of first officers coming in who
01:12have a commercial pilot's license. They need to be type-rated onto our aircraft. We have a program
01:17with the Ministry of Education to do that in Spain. So that's really supplying that through.
01:22And so Saudi Arabia has now become very, very attractive to live in. So when we do require
01:26foreigners, particularly for our captains, we don't have a problem or a challenge to be
01:30able to bring them into the kingdom.
Comments