Integrated ops underpin CityJet’s regional ACMI work

Bernie Baldwin

Ireland-based CityJet believes long-term ACMI deals rather than ‘fill-in’ wet-leasing suits its business plan.

“Our strategy is to be the capacity provider of choice in the regional jet space,” So declared CityJet’s chief commercial officer, Cathal O’Connell, to delegates CONNECT 2024 in Turin. “Our target is to secure long-term structural contracts with our customer airlines, to integrate our operation as part of their network strategy. And that’s what we’ve done for example with SAS.”

CityJet has been flying for SAS since 2016 and currently flies 22 CRJ900s for the major. “SAS had been looking to grow their network and participate in markets which would not be feasible with a normal narrowbody capacity. If they went in to those markets with their own narrowbodies, they wouldn’t have had a lot of density. It would just be one frequency per day,” O’Connell stated.

“The 90-seat regional jet provides the opportunity to look at how many frequencies a day can you operate, and obviously the number of frequencies you operate gives you the ability then to target business traffic and leisure,” he added.

“We look at our customers as partners who will see us as part of their network strategy. They shouldn’t say, ‘We might get CityJet in this year and not get it next year, maybe the year after.’ It’s about them looking at structural network design and looking at the CRJ or whatever aircraft we may be operating in the future, to see that as part of their normal network.”

O’Connell noted that the only difference between looking at a CityJet aircraft and an aircraft operated by SAS is a logo that says ‘Operated by CityJet’. “Our crew are in SAS uniforms. Our aircraft are in SAS colours. So what we’re trying to do is be, I suppose, like the ‘Intel inside’ that you see on the side of your laptop. We deliver the capacity. That’s what we do. But everything that you see or touch in relation to CityJet should reflect the airline whose ticket you have actually purchased.”

CityJet’s strategy actually involves investment in customers, and O’Connell uses crew bases as an example. “We try and establish a presence,” he remarked. “So we’ve had crew bases in Brussels supporting our Brussels Airlines operation. We’ve had them in Paris supporting our Air France operation. We have crew in Copenhagen and Stockholm. In fact, 80% of CityJet staff are currently employed in Copenhagen and something like 97% of our cabin crew, speak a Scandinavian language. We’re a Dublin-based operation, but our flying is primarily out in Scandinavia, and that’s what we do.

“That requires an integration right through our organisation and our customer airline organisation. Integration at the product level, at the planning level, the network design level. To do that, you need a long term contract to do it properly. Even for our seasonal contracts, we will spend a number of months in advance working with our customer airlines to try and ensure that that integration is in place.”

O’Connell explained further the preference for long-term contracts, with not much seasonality. “Narrowbody activity traditionally is more seasonal in its design. When you look at the typical regional jet operation, we have aircraft that fly 10 flights a day. Very few of our A320 or 737 colleagues would have that type of production. We also fly in a relatively tight window, probably 05:00 to 23:00. We don’t do through-the-night flights because that’s not what the regional market is,” he commented.

“The design of a network that a regional jet flies is different. It requires a more complex design than a lot of the activity that you may see on the narrowbodies. For example, we have crew who will leave Copenhagen at the start of their duty and they spend the next five nights in Norway, where we do a lot of intra-Norwegian flying. That’s structurally designed with our customer to optimise their use of the aircraft. And it’s something that you can only do with good long-term experience, design, planning and integration,” O’Connell concluded.

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