Category Archives: easyJet (Europe)

easyJet adds Rabat and three new routes

easyJet is adding Rabat, Morocco starting in late October.

The airline will serve Rabat (RBA) from Geneva (staring on October 31), Lyon (November 1) and Paris (CDG) (October 31).

easyJet adds a new destination from Munich

EasyJet is now connecting a new destination with Munich.

From June 28, the low-cost airline is serving Naples three times a week, satisfying the high demand from Munich’s catchment area for flights to the popular vacation region.

With flights to the region around the Amalfi Coast and the offshore islands of Capri and Ischia, the airline has added another route to its established flights from Munich to London-Gatwick, Manchester and Edingburgh.

The traditional ribbon cutting ceremony was carried out by Stephan Erler, EasyJet’s Country Manager Germany (photo: 5th from right), Thomas Kube VP Route & Passenger Development of Munich Airport (photo: 3rd from right) and Stephan Weisang, Director Route & Passenger Development of Munich Airport (4th from left) together with crew members.

Could easyJet and TAP be purchase targets of IAG?

International Airlines Group (IAG) has a large cash reserve. According to The Times, IAG could use this cash reserve to acquire additional airlines for the group.

New speculation includes British Airways’ rival easyJet and TAP Portugal which the Portuguese government wants to unload.

easyJet and Neos: starting from June, flights will be available from Southern Italy to New York and Santo Domingo via Milan Malpensa

easyJet has made this announcement:

The partnership between easyJet, the leading airline in Milan Malpensa, and Neos, the second Italian airline and part of the Alpitour group, aims to increase connectivity between Southern Italy and th…

easyJet and Neos have announced a partnership to further enhance connections from Italy to some of the most attractive intercontinental destinations. Starting from 16 June, easyJet will provide connecting flights from Catania, Naples and Palermo to Neos’ passengers departing for New York JFK Airport and Santo Domingo La Romana Airport, with a stopover at Milan Malpensa Airport, easyJet’s main hub in continental Europe.

As a result of the partnership, easyJet, the leading airline at Milan Malpensa, will offer flights from Catania, Palermo, and Naples to Neos and Alpitour customers heading to the United States and the Dominican Republic, allowing Alpitour Group, the leading tour operator in Italy, to further expand its product offering in Southern Italy.

easyJet (UK) aircraft photo gallery:

easyJet partners with GKN Aerospace to accelerate adoption of Hydrogen

easyJet has announced it is working with GKN Aerospace, the world’s leading multi-technology tier 1 aerospace supplier, to work toward reducing carbon emissions in aviation through the adoption of zero carbon emission technologies..

easyJet will support the development of GKN Aerospace’s Hydrogen Combustion (H2JET) and Hydrogen Fuel Cell (H2GEAR) technology, including exploring the options for flight demonstration, as part of the airline’s ambition to de-carbonise aviation. Among others, easyJet will provide insights into operational requirements and economics.

H2GEAR is a GKN Aerospace led ground-breaking UK collaboration programme aiming to develop a liquid hydrogen propulsion system for sub-regional aircraft that could be scaled up to larger aircraft. Liquid hydrogen is being converted to electricity within a fuel cell system. This electricity efficiently powers the aircraft, eliminating carbon emissions and creating a new generation of clean air travel.

The H2GEAR program is supported by £27M of ATI funding, matched by GKN Aerospace and its industrial partners.

H2JET is a Swedish collaborative two-year programme led by GKN Aerospace to push development of key subsystems for gas turbine-based hydrogen propulsion of medium range civil aircraft.

Championing the development of a zero carbon emission aircraft to de-carbonise aviation is a key focus for easyJet, and the airline is working with partners across the industry like GKN Aerospace, as well as Airbus, Rolls-Royce, Cranfield Aerospace Solutions and Wright Electric, to accelerate the development of zero carbon emission technologies and supporting infrastructure. The airline is optimistic that it could begin flying customers on planes powered by hydrogen-combustion, hydrogen-electric or a hybrid of both by the mid to late-2030s.

In November last year, easyJet joined Race to Zero, a global UN-backed campaign to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 at the latest. In joining Race to Zero, the airline committed to setting an interim science-based target for 2035 and to reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, for which technology for zero carbon emission flying will play an important part.

In 2019, easyJet became the first major airline worldwide to offset the carbon emissions from the fuel used for all its flights and remains the only major airline in Europe to do so. This comes at no additional cost to its customers and the airline only supports projects that are certified by either Gold Standard or Verified Carbon Standard. This is an interim measure to address its impact on the environment in the short-term.

Beyond carbon, easyJet is focusing on reducing plastic – more than 36 million single-use plastic items were eliminated – as well as reducing waste within its wider operations and the supply chain. The airline also introduced new crew uniforms made from recycled plastic bottles. With 45 bottles in each uniform this has the potential to prevent 2.7 million plastic bottles from ending up in landfill or in oceans over the next five years.

easyJet aircraft photo gallery:

easyJet grounds its entire fleet

easyJet today grounded its entire fleet.

The airline issued this short statement:

“As a result of the unprecedented travel restrictions imposed by governments in response to the coronavirus pandemic and the implementation of national lockdowns across many European countries, easyJet has, today, fully grounded its entire fleet of aircraft.

Over recent days easyJet has been helping to repatriate customers, having operated more than 650 rescue flights to date, returning home more than 45,000 customers. The last of these rescue flights were operated on Sunday March 29.”

easyJet (UK) aircraft photo gallery:

easyJet to ground majority of fleet from March 24

easyJet has made this announcement:

Following the country lockdowns, travel restrictions and changes to travel advice across its network, easyJet has taken the decision to ground the majority of its fleet of aircraft from Tuesday, March 24 onwards.

We will continue to operate rescue flights as required to repatriate customers and anticipate most of our rescue operations to be completed by Monday, March 23.

Details of the rescue flights we are operating to repatriate customers can be found here: https://www.easyjet.com/en/policy/coronavirus-rescue-flights. If you are currently abroad, we urge you to rebook yourself onto a rescue flight prior to Monday.

In addition, we anticipate operating a minimal schedule of essential services on some routes. This will be a maximum of 10% of our usual capacity during this time of year and mainly routes to, from and within the UK.

We will continue to review our flight schedule on a weekly basis to ensure that it matches current demand. With recent guidance, we recognize many customers with existing reservations do not intend to travel, and so we would encourage them to change their tickets for free now, as this will allow us to best match our remaining flying to the demand. easyJet continues to waive all change fees for customers who want to move their flight to a later date and they can now change up until February 28, 2021. Customers will be contacted directly if their flight is cancelled and will be provided with their options.

Johan Lundgren, easyJet CEO, said:

“These are unprecedented times for the airline industry. We know how important it is for customers to get home and so are continuing to operate rescue flights over the coming days to repatriate them. Significantly reducing our flying program is the right thing to do when many countries have issued advice to their citizens not to travel unless it is essential and the aircraft groundings will also remove significant levels of variable costs at a time when this remains crucial.”

easyJet aircraft photo gallery:

easyJet inaugurates a large CAE training center at Milan Malpensa Airport

By Marco Finelli reporting from Italy.

Near the airport of Milan Malpensa, the CAE Training Center was inaugurated on October 10 in the presence of easyJet CEO Johan Lundgren.

It is the third training center opened after those in London Gatwick and Manchester. It is located in the area of the World Trade Center at the Tornavento district built by Avioport BV, a Schipol Airport company.

The continuous qualification of the crews is a fundamental and essential element for flight safety. The need to open such a structure is due to the large number of based pilots at Milan Malpensa, the largest of the British budget carrier outside the United Kingdom.

In addition to the bases of Venice and Naples, in total, there are 34 aircraft based in Italy, which operate 500 daily operations and about 20 million passengers transported each year.

For this reason, Lundgren said “easyJet is the third largest carrier in terms of passenger volume among those operating in Italy, at Milan Malpensa wehave transported over 70 million passengers since the start of operations in 2006. Today there are 21 based aircraft”. He adds, “We need to qualify over 1400 pilots and flight attendants working with Italian contracts. In the last 10 years we have always invested with a long-term and sustainable approach to create value for all local stakeholders “.

Nick Leontidis – President of the CAE Aviation Training Solutions Group – expressed himself at the new CAE center in Milan Malpensa. With this new addition to its network, CAE will be able to train over 35,000 pilots of commercial flights in Europe, including more than 2000 pilots per year at the new CAE training center in Milan Malpensa ”.

After the speeches of the representatives of the CAE and easyJet, the Councilor for transport of the Lombardy Region and then the Ambassador of Canada. Then the ribbon was cut and a simulator was programmed to perform a dance session to the rhythm of house music through its six axes. Following guests did simulation sessions with a 20 minutesflight each.
The CAE training center in Milan Malpensa is an avant-garde structure composed of modern training classrooms, dedicated spaces for briefing and subsequent debriefing with the most sophisticated technologies available on the market.

Currently three CAE7000XR full motion simulators have been installed, designed for the Airbus 320 family aircraft. They are equipped with the CAE Tropos 6000XR vision system. Next December a CAE600XR static simulator will be installed, equipped with the collimated CAE Tropos 6000XR visual system and an adjoining area dedicated to instructors. easyJet will be the first airline to train its pilots on the CAE 600XR, thanks to the use of a simulator with the highest accuracy available on the static training market.

EasyJet’s 10-year investment for the three centers run by CAE and over 170 million Canadian dollars with the supply of 10 full motion simulators, in addition to three FTDs. All the centers were opened in these ten days, first Gatwick, then Manchester and then Milan.

Each simulator works by performing 5 daily sessions of 4 hours each for a total of 20 hours total. Each session consists of an hour and a half of briefing before the flight, the 4 hours of flight and a subsequent hour of debriefing.

All photos by Marco Finelli.

easyJet to partner with Cathay Pacific, now has 130 aircraft registered in Austria for Brexit

easyJet has made this announcement:

easyJet customers will be able to connect seamlessly between easyJet flights across its European network flying into London Gatwick Airport and onwards on Cathay Pacific flights, initially between London Gatwick and Hong Kong once it is live on Worldwide in the coming weeks.

Worldwide by easyJet has been consistently growing in popularity. Chicago is currently the most popular longhaul destination connecting through Rome while the Rome-Reykjavik connection is the most popular shorthaul connection. To date, more than 5,000 unique origins and destinations which have been booked in combination with partner airlines.

easyJet has leadership positions at more of Europe’s major airports and flies on more of Europe’s 100 largest routes than any other airline which makes it the most attractive European short haul airline partner. The introduction of this disruptive product opens up new 70m market segment for easyJet.

This addition of Cathay Pacific compliments easyJet’s existing relationships with long haul carriers Emirates, Virgin Atlantic, Norwegian, WestJet and Singapore Airlines.

Worldwide by easyJet launched in September 2017 enabling customers to connect easyJet flights through London Gatwick to long haul flights, with launch airline partners WestJet and Norwegian. This quickly expanded to Thomas Cook Airlines, Corsair, La Compagnie and Loganair and the connections platform was extended to Milan Malpensa airport in December 2017. Virgin Atlantic and Emirates joined as partners in October 2018 followed by Singapore Airlines.

Worldwide by easyJet now connects to a total of 11 airports across Europe, including Amsterdam, Barcelona, Paris CDG and Orly, which in addition to London Gatwick, Milan Malpensa, Berlin Tegel and Venice Marco Polo, means that over half of the airline’s flights – and 53 million easyJet customers a year – will be able to connect to airline partner services and other easyJet flights in a single booking through easyJet’s digital booking portal.

In other news, easyJet also reported on its financial performance through December 31, 2018:

easyJet has delivered a good performance in the quarter with robust customer demand driving passenger and ancillary revenue which is in line with expectations. Underlying revenue per seat was positive, including good ancillary revenue growth. This was offset, as expected, by the impact from last year’s one-off revenue benefits, the dilutive impact of flying at Tegel and new accounting standards delaying the recognition of revenue. easyJet has made good progress with its cost and operational performance but both were affected by the impact of drone activity at London Gatwick over the Christmas period.

Commenting; Johan Lundgren, easyJet Chief Executive said:

“easyJet has made a good start to the 2019 financial year with robust customer demand and ancillary sales, driving solid revenue generation. This was underpinned by good operating and on-time performance across the network, with the exception of the disruption caused by the Gatwick closures due to drone sightings. There has been be a one-off cost impact from this incident, but underlying cost progress is in line with expectations. I am proud of the way our teams worked around the clock to mitigate the impact of the incident and looked after affected customers.

“Recognition of the easyJet brand continues to grow. We made good progress on our strategic initiatives; holidays, business, loyalty and data during the quarter.

“For the first half of 2019, booking levels currently remain encouraging despite the lack of certainty around Brexit for our customers. Second half bookings continue to be ahead of last year and our expectations for the full year headline profit before tax are broadly in line with current market expectations.”

Revenue

Total revenue in the first quarter to 31 December 2018 increased by 13.7% to £1,296 million. Passenger revenue increased by 12.2% to £1,025 million and ancillary revenue increased by 19.9% to £271 million.

Passenger¹ numbers in the quarter increased by 15.1% to 21.6 million, driven by an increase in capacity² of 18.2% to 24.1 million seats which was slightly lower than originally planned due in part to the drone issues at London Gatwick and to late A321 deliveries from Airbus.

Load factor³ decreased by two percentage points to 89.7%, as anticipated, due to the one-off increase in prior year late demand and the dilutive impact of Tegel flying.

Total revenue per seat decreased by 4.2% at constant currency, in line with expectations. This performance has been driven by:

An increase in underlying revenue per seat of 1.5% due to:

– Robust underlying demand and disciplined capacity growth by competitors on easyJet’s markets, supported by easyJet’s increasing brand recognition

– Continued growth in ancillary revenue per seat through better bag and allocated seating sales

The negative impact from:

– The dilutive impact of first time flying in Q1 at Berlin Tegel (where the schedule is still in the early stages of optimisation)

– One-off benefits experienced in 2018 not being repeated:

Air Berlin and Monarch bankruptcies (Q1 2018 benefit of c.£30m)
Ryanair winter schedule cancellations last year (Q1 2018 benefit of c.£20m)

– The impact of the move to IFRS 15 accounting standards (c.£8m revenue impact in Q1)

– Cancelled flights and lost revenue resulting from the drone issue at London Gatwick (c.£5m revenue impact)

Cost

easyJet’s underlying cost performance has been solid and in line with expectations, before the cost impact of the drones at Gatwick. Headline cost per seat excluding fuel at constant currency increased by 1.0% in the quarter reflecting:

– A £10 million cost impact of the drones at Gatwick relating to customer welfare costs (representing c.1ppt of cost per seat in Q1). The incident affected around 82,000 customers and led to over 400 flights being cancelled

– Annualisation of crew pay deals; better than expected crew retention; and some additional inefficiency relating to Gatwick disruption

– Ownership costs reflecting new aircraft year on year, some additional leasing costs resulting from late Airbus aircraft deliveries and the impact of IFRS 16 accounting

easyJet’s cost programme has continued to deliver substantial savings in particular in:

– Airport costs, driven by discounts on additional passenger volumes, and

– Fleet up-gauging from A319 ceo to A320 neo and A321 neo, albeit this has been marginally impacted by Airbus delivery delays

– Reduced level of cancellations and delays over 3 hours despite the drone issue at Gatwick

Customer and operational performance

easyJet has improved its On-Time Performance (OTP) since the difficult 2018 summer. The closure of Gatwick airport due to the drone issues had a negative impact on OTP but after adjusting for this December network OTP was better at 81%.

OTP % arrivals within 15 minutes	Oct	Nov	Dec	Q1
Q1 ’19	76%	86%	77%	79%
Q1 ’18	81%	88%	74%	81%

Traffic statistics

As announced at the full year results in November, easyJet will now be reporting monthly passenger statistics within its quarterly reports. Load factor was slightly lower than Q1 2018 due to one-off prior year benefits and the dilutive impact of Tegel flying.

easyJet experienced 764 cancellations in Q1 2019 compared to 1,051 cancellations in Q1 2018, with the biggest number of cancellations due to the drone issue at London Gatwick.

	Oct	Nov	Dec	Q1
Passengers (‘000)	8,578	6,182	6,831	21,592
Passenger growth	14.1%	15.6%	16.1%	15.1%
Load factor	90.5%	89.2%	89.2%	89.7%

Sale and Leaseback

easyJet has entered into another planned sale and leaseback arrangement for 10 A319 aircraft which has generated £120 million in cash and further facilitates our fleet management strategy. Six were completed during the quarter and a further four were finalised on 8 January. This will be disclosed as a non-headline item in the income statement and is currently expected to be a small loss on disposal.

Brexit

easyJet is well prepared for Brexit. It now has 130 aircraft registered in Austria and has made good progress in ensuring it has a spare parts pool in the EU27 and in transferring crew licences, both of which will be completed by 29 March. Both the EU and the UK have committed to ensure that flights between the UK and EU will continue in the event of a no-deal Brexit.

Routes from Vienna:

In order to remain owned and controlled by EEA qualifying nationals, as required by EU regulations, easyJet has a number of options, including the use of the provisions contained in its Articles of Association which would permit it to suspend rights to attend and vote at meetings of shareholders and/or forcing the sale of shares owned by non-qualifying nationals as well as other potential actions. easyJet has increased its ownership by qualifying EEA (excluding UK) nationals to around 49%.

Outlook

Despite the consumer and economic uncertainty created by Brexit, demand currently remains solid and forward bookings for the period after 29^th March are robust.

For the year ending 30 September 2019, easyJet expects:

Full Year capacity to grow by c.10%; H1 2019 growth of c.15%
With approximately 40% of forward bookings secured for the second quarter, revenue per seat at constant currency for the first half is expected to decrease by mid to high single digits. This update reflects:

– Continued positive underlying trading in line with Q1, but larger than previously anticipated phasing impact from H1 to H2 from the impact of new IFRS 15 accounting standards and the shift of Easter into H2. IFRS 15 is expected to have a negative impact of around £50 million in the first half and Easter is expected to have a negative impact of around £50 million in the first half. Both of these will reverse in the second half

– A more competitive market in Berlin as well as constraints on our ability to deliver network optimisation as quickly as anticipated. easyJet now expects a loss in FY 2019 in Berlin

Full Year headline cost per seat excluding fuel at constant currency to be circa flat (assuming normal levels of disruption), using new IFRS 15 and 16 accounting standards and including the £10m cost impact from the drones issue at London Gatwick
Full Year unit fuel bill is likely to be £10 million to £60 million adverse⁴. The total fuel bill is expected to be c.£1.46 billion, reflecting a reduction in the price of oil since November and continued higher carbon pricing.
Foreign exchange⁴ movements will have a c.£10 million adverse impact on headline profit before tax
easyJet expectations for the full year are broadly in line with current market expectations⁵

Top Copyright Photo (all others by the airline): easyJet (Europe) Airbus A320-214 WL OE-ICR (msn 6885) ZRH (Rolf Wallner). Image: 944772.

easyJet (Europe) aircraft slide show: