Air Malta carried more than a million passengers last summer

The summer months brought Air Malta more than just restructuring and unending uncertainty because Malta’s national airline also transported 1.1 million passengers in only five months.

Air Malta’s summer schedule ended on 31 October and the airline confirmed that it had achieved unprecedented levels of seat occupancy between June and October. The airline had a seat load factor in access of 90% across the entire network.

David Curmi, Air Malta executive chairman, said that throughout the summer Air Malta lived up to its purpose of providing regular and stable connectivity at all times.

“We stood by our belief that it is better to give our customers confidence that they will travel as opposed to enforced flight cancellations leaving customers stranded with no alternative travel options available,” he said.

He explained how despite the challenges faced at certain key airports, Air Malta kept being one of the airlines that cancelled the lowest number of flights while keeping delays and disruption to the barest minimum.

Chief Commercial Officer, Roy Kinnear, talked about plans to grow the airline’s network further and increase it’s flying time in the upcoming two years.

“Whilst existing routes will be retained, we are considering adding five new destinations... This means, increasing our weekly flights by over 20% to 155 flights,” Kinnear said.

Air Malta is passing through a painful restructuring process as government seeks the European Commission’s green light to shore up the airline.

In January, Finance Minister Clyde Caruana announced a voluntary employee transfer scheme in a bid to cut Air Malta’s workforce by half and save €15 million per year in wages.

However, this process has stalled and government pushed back the deadline for Air Malta’s employee transfer scheme to the end of the year, while also introducing a generous voluntary redundancy and early retirement scheme.

Meanwhile, talks are underway with pilots over a clause in their collective agreement that obliges the airline to continue paying them after they retire from active duty until pensionable age. Government wants to buy out this clause, which is costing the airline a lot of money.

Pilots were excluded from the redundancy schemes since Air Malta had sacked 69 pilots in the summer of 2020 after talks with the Airline Pilots Association broke down. The move came after a protracted stand-off between the airline’s management and pilots after the latter refused to accept a social wage of €1,200 per month in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis.