Catch of the day spurs flydubai chief

The head of Dubai’s low-cost airline flydubai takes a laid back approach to running the fast-growing carrier. With a love of football and fishing, hooking lucrative new routes in a crowded playing field underpins his firm’s success.

Ghaith Al Ghaith is busy finding the low-cost carrier’s most profitable spokes within range of its fleet amid a growing focus on the subcontinent. Gabriela Maj / Bloomberg News

Ghaith Al Ghaith fished from the teeming Al Shindagha shore of Dubai Creek as a boy.

Today he still enjoys life’s three great simple pleasures of family, football and fishing.

The flydubai chief is surprisingly understated. He seems especially so in an industry with its fair share of executive peacockery.

His laid-back style is a characteristic he shares with his mentor, Sheikh Ahmed Bin Saeed Al Maktoum, who is the chairman of both flydubai and Emirates.

The approach contrasts sharply with the breakneck growth of flydubai since it launched in 2008.

Last year it added 23 new routes, making it one of the region’s fastest growing carriers.

While many of its destinations require a good atlas to locate, its expansion across central Asia, eastern Europe and Africa is reaping rewards.

Last year its profit grew more than 12 per cent to Dh250 million, helped by teasing out lucrative but overlooked routes such as Kuwait City, where it now operates 77 flights per week.

Some of its latest additions also seem counter-intuitive at first glance. As Dubai’s hoteliers mourned the loss of Russian tourists to the country’s economic crisis, flydubai last month added the cities of Novosibirsk and Nizhniy Novgorod to its Russian network. As other carriers stripped capacity away, Mr Al Ghaith’s airline picked up the slack.

It is also building its presence in Iran, adding Lar to its list of eight other destinations in the country, which should position the airline well if international sanctions are relaxed or removed.

“We are growing wherever there are opportunities,” Mr Al Ghaith says.

The rapid expansion into underserved destinations from Juba to Bandar Abbas is not unlike the trail blazed by Ireland’s Ryanair when it first opened up low-cost travel to cities across central and eastern Europe.

With such momentum to maintain, great questions of fuel hedging, open skies and protectionism are probably not going to keep the chief executive and football fan up at night. But Arsène Wenger’s Arsenal team choice for the end of season English Premier League clash with Manchester United just might.

“I had to go home for a nap to prepare for the game yesterday,” he confides, referring to Arsenal’s 3-1 defeat of Hull the night before our meeting in Dubai.

The interview feels a bit like being in a half-time Match of the Day discussion with occasional references to the airline industry.

He switches between global aviation politics, marlin fishing and football tactics with the dexterity of a good holding midfielder – the lack of which has been at the root of Arsenal’s problems in recent seasons, he points out.

Creating space in the crowded pitch of the aviation industry has also defined flydubai's growth strategy. As the region's big three carriers target the major hubs of global travel, flydubai's model is all about finding the most profitable spokes within range of its fleet of about 50 Boeing 737-800 NG aircraft.

The latest additions to its network in Russia and Iran are an extension of that theme.

As a student in the United States in the early 1980s, Mr Al Ghaith remembers being surprised at the concept of commuting to work by plane. Today he has found similarly huge potential for commuter traffic growth within the region and in India, where he would like to see the airline have a much greater presence.

“It happens in America, it happens in Europe and then it happens here,” he says of air traffic trends. “Here there are still not enough seats, there are not enough flights.”

But it is India where he sees the most potential for flydubai to grow, despite a constrictive seat allocation system that limits the expansion of foreign carriers in the country.

“Our best bet is that the government of India decides there are certain routes that can be opened up to encourage people to commute more easily,” he says.

Less than 2 per cent of the airline’s capacity is taken up by India. He says it should account for more like 20 per cent of its capacity. Pakistan also represents a big opportunity, he says.

Mr Al Ghaith learnt the ropes of the global aviation industry at Emirates, where he joined as a management trainee in 1986. Sheikh Ahmed has been a lifelong influence and was the reason he joined Emirates in the first place, he says.

The Emirates’ style of ambitious growth is reflected in flydubai’s expansion since it started life seven years ago as Dubai’s first low-cost airline.

A management structure that supports quick decision-making has helped it to accelerate from a standing start in March 2008 to operating 1,400 flights a week today.

“In a lot of countries you have bureaucrats, politicians and other interests – so the process can take a long time,” he says.

Mr Al Ghaith’s association with Sheikh Ahmed goes all the way back to those childhood days when he fished from the creek in the same neighbourhood as the man who would become his mentor.

It is the sort of image of old Dubai that would not look out of place in an Emirates global advertising campaign – a reminder of the emirate’s maritime history and heritage shot in sepia, in the days before indoor ski slopes and record-breaking towers turned our heads.

But it is also explains why, for Mr Al Ghaith, running flydubai is as much about the bigger picture of the emirate’s and country’s progress and development.

While the row over whether the region’s big carriers benefit from state support rages on and accusations of unfair play are lobbed back and forth across the Atlantic, it is perhaps this intangible characteristic of airlines such as Emirates and flydubai that sets them apart.

“You have to understand and live the dynamics of our country in order to judge,” he says. “I would not go and work for someone else. For us it’s not just a job.”

As we part, the conversation moves back to football and fishing. He talks about landing his first marlin and how he would like to watch the FA Cup final at the end of the month with his son, who is coming through national service.

The fishing is not what it used to be off the coast of Dubai, I remark.

“Not so,” he says. “You just need to know where to look to catch them.”

Which rather sums up the flydubai approach to finding passengers.

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