Dubai Air Show: Ethiopian places $3B Airbus A350 order

Ethiopian Airlines is to buy 12 Airbus A350-900 aircraft in a deal worth $3 billion at catalogue prices, it was announced at Dubai Air Show. The announcement firms up a previously signed Memorandum of Understanding.

The significance of the deal is that it makes Ethiopian – which also has Boeing 787s on order – a new Airbus customer.

“Until this order, I had not been successful in selling Airbus to Ethiopian,” said John Leahy, Airbus chief operating officer – customers. “The key is that they saw that the A350 is the aircraft of the future. This is not a price deal but a technology deal.

“The easiest job in the world is selling the A350.”

Deliveries of the aircraft are scheduled to begin in 2017, although Girma Wake, chief executive of Ethiopian Airlines said that depending on market conditions, the airline might need them earlier.

He added that while the Boeing 787s would be deployed on sectors of seven to eight hours, the Airbus A350s were destined for routes of 10 – 11 hours.

“Generally, mixing aircraft can be difficult, but when you reach a certain level on terms of your fleet (size) it can be an advantage,” he said.

He added that Ethiopian has been growing at 20% a year for the last five years, adding six international destinations a year to its network and taking delivery of five or six aircraft a year to support the expansion.