Scheduled, wet-lease and charter operations combine to give Danish Air Transport a solid business.
Danish Air Transport (DAT) benefits from offering a “slightly different model” from the strict ACMI operators in the market, according to Luigi Vallero, the company’s General Manager Italy. Speaking in the panel session, “Ultimate flexibility: the role of wet-lease and ACMI airlines in unlocking cost-effective capacity”, Vallero outlined a model developed on two different bases – a fully scheduled operation with a wet-lease operations alongside it.
“The scheduled part of the operations is performed by our ATR fleet, while the remaining part of the business is actually ACMI operations, performed by the Airbus fleet,” he reported, before going on to elaborate on where 14 ATR 42s and 72s are performing.
“Right now, we have four aircraft deployed in Norway flying four routes under PSO [Public Service Obligation] regulations, including the far north. We have one aircraft based in Saarbrücken in Germany, flying a couple of services per day to Berlin and to Hamburg. We also fly domestically within Denmark, which is not a PSO operation, but it’s sort of regulated by the needs of Bornholm, an island off the coast of Sweden which is part of Denmark, connecting it with Copenhagen and other points in Denmark, depending on the season,” Vallero said.
“Then we have the Italian operations, for which I’m responsible. That’s a purely PSO operation. We have been performing flights down there in Sicily, connecting the islands of Lampedusa and Pantelleria with the three main airports in Trapani, Palermo and Catania since 1st July 2018. That’s quite an important operation for DAT, because we provide a substantial amount of passengers to the whole operation. It’s about 275,000 passengers per year out of 1.4 million passengers carried by the whole company.”
Demonstrating further flexibility in its model, ATR aircraft not flying in those operations are available for ACMI work. Plus, the company is constantly evaluating any kind of PSO which emerges. If there is an opportunity, DAT checks to see if aircraft are available and, if so, it launches a bid which, if awarded, makes DAT the route operator.
With a mixed operation, seasonality becomes an issue for DAT. “You have to keep in mind that when it’s summer here in Europe, it’s winter somewhere else and vice versa. If you’re a scout in the market you can find niches [for operations] somewhere else,” Vallero noted. “It’s also true that the Northern Hemisphere winter usually the season when heavy maintenance is performed. That’s what we usually do as well to keep everything on track with our fleets. But if you look at what DAT has been doing in the past, we can say that the sky is the limit in the sense that we have been flying almost everywhere in the world.
“Before Covid we had aircraft flying on behalf of Caribbean Airlines between Trinidad and Tobago and so on. We had stints with an ATR 42 based in Bhutan. So you have to look for niche markets which are more or less always available. Right now, we have a long-term contract with Air Arabia, with two A320s flying on their behalf based in Sharjah,” the GM remarked.
Continuing the flexibility theme, DAT has reinvented itself quite a number of times during its 35 years of existence, developing from operating a Shorts Skyvan to carry freight – “anything from mail to horses”. In the latter part of the last decade, the company had a very large commitment to charter operations, according to Vallero, which was a sizable chunk of its activity.
“Then the charter market developed in a different way to what we were accustomed, so we finally decided that the right model was to focus on these two lines of products – scheduled operations and ACMI,” he explained. “The PSO part grants long-term operations that give you some sort of stability; with PSOs you usually have a part of the fleet which is tied to contracts that last between three and four years. Then we had to place the Airbus fleet on the wet lease market. Whenever possible, we like to get medium- to long-term leases here as well.”
Continuing on the theme of long-term stability, Vallero acknowledged that the market changes. He doesn’t see stability being easy in the immediate term. “That’s because all travel patterns have been completely revolutionised after COVID and so on,” he commented.
There may be a source of stability in the future though. “Right now we don’t carry any freight. That was the core business 35 years ago but in the future who knows, maybe there could be an opportunity. The importance is to always be on the lookout and to grab any opportunity that arises. And DAT has always been very good at that,” he declared.
