That's preposterous! I think you're way off base on this!

Sincerely,

John Byerly.

Actually, one of the authors of an academic research paper quoted many times by the "White Paper" says his views were misrepresentated and felt strongly enough about this to write a rebuttle. Kind of sad when one of the people you use to make your point says your full of it.


http://m.atwonline.com/open-skies/co...cademic-report


By the way Sink R8. Emirates does not take our passports. We come and go as we please. Not sure where that one came from.

Not specifically directed at TP, but to those who are taking the sheikh's side of the debate....

I read on Yahoo! Finance that Emirates is supposed to be writing some sort of rebuttal to all the points made in the white paper. I would think that their glossy magazine article hit piece with a "oh no we didn't" response is not the formal response to the charges.

He can strongly deny whatever he wants. The reader of the magazine (both this one and the one that hopefully will come out in the future with actual facts and numbers) has to remember that Tim Clark is the "Baghdad Bob" of Emirates. He works for an authoritarian regime with little transparency. Of course he is going to strongly deny everything. "There are no American infidels in Baghdad." Got it Tim.

The problem I see is that he could have simply laid out factual data in the article, but he didn't. The only thing that comes close is page 3, but it is totally lacking the detail the U.S. airlines provide in their charges. In response to the fuel hedges, he has some convoluted story, when all he had to do was say, "Hey we had XX million dirhams in the bank on the date the fuel hedges required payment, the expired contracts cost YY million dirhams, and when we accounted for the losses we had ZZ million dirhams left over. See? We had plenty of cash to cover the losses and therefore didn't need government help."

Then he could have pointed to the accounting in the airline's annual report that justified XX, YY, and ZZ. But he didn't do that. Why not? That would be so easy. Take a look at Delta's (for example) last quarterly report. They clearly state the write down they're going to take due to their hedging losses and you can see their cash flow and their cash balance. Easy for a U.S. airline. Hard if you're an airline run by an absolute monarchy apparently?

Same thing with the landing fee/airline subsidy debate. Notice the choice of words: "Emirates pays the full published rates at DXB." Yeah, Timmy, the published rates are the problem. They're too low to cover the cost of the money needed to support a shiny new airport's operation in an expensive country. He talks about Singapore and Hong Kong making significant investments in their airport infrastructure (and they are, AW&ST recently talked about the huge changes that will be happening in SIN and HKG in the near future), but then fails to compare the rates at DXB to those airports and instead chooses KUL. KUL? The charge being leveled against Emirates is that the DXB is not charging Emirates enough in fees, taxes, whatever, to cover the cost of a hugely expensive airport, and not having to pay those fees are a subsidy when the sheikh is picking up the tab.

The last comments about stealing revenue and passengers......I'll agree with his statement that passengers aren't propietary property of anyone. But if you're dumping subsidized capacity in a market, allegedly illegally, then yes, you are stealing revenue and passengers. If Emirates is dumping an A380 into a market with first class suites with showers, new airplanes, and better service only because a sheikh is propping them up financially, then yeah, it's stealing.

"We offer a great product at a competitive price, which appeals to the consumers who choose to fly with us," is stated in the article, but the real question is, could Emirates afford (or the market sustain) this great product at a competitive price if Emirates had to abide by the rules of Open Skies and did not receive significant subsidies? Probably not, but again no hard proof was provided in the article.

Since I find myself repeating the same thing over and over, I'm done after this less than pithy response. I'm anxiously awaiting the "real" response from Emirates, although with the lack of transparency an absolute monarchy/authoritarian regime provides, I doubt we'll ever be able to peek behind the veil.

Don't worry globalexpress, Timmy will come back with a sledgehammer to set things straight:eek:

""Having read the report, you could drive a bulldozer through just about everything... We will deal a sledgehammer to that report as far as Emirates and Dubai is concerned," Clark said at a conference in Dubai."

I'm a sucker for emotional propaganda:D

My apologies if false. I got it from an article circulted via fb, focusing on a Swedish FA, Spanish pilot, and various other actors. Don't have it front of me. Memorable alleged quote by Baker, to FA's: "The pilots are just my chauffeurs; they only want to f:::: you".

Anyone have the article?

Al Baker is the the head of Qatar Airways, not EK. I don't have enough knowledge about Qatar to comment on their passport policies.

My apologies again, you are correct. Here is the article in question: The truth about the luxury of Qatar Airways | Nyheter | Expressen

It's true that I sometimes make the mistake of lumping these state-championed, open-skies-violating airlines together, without regards to varying degrees of abuse, or without drawing large distinctions between the way one might treat women poorly, or another might treat them worse.

I'm not trying to get an education on the subtleties of ME airlines, I just make distinctions between airlines that cheat, and airlines that don't.

I'll stipulate to the appearance that, on the surface, Emirates cheats less than the others. Maybe they're upset that their neighbors are getting in on the action, and getting a bit greedy? Maybe Emirates developed their cheating strategy to be borderline, but not so obvious as to draw outside scrutiny too early, and maybe the other guys jumped in too fast, too obvious, and with too much funding, and ruined the whole game for them? When you compare the charges, it seems like there are far less demonstrated subsidies for Emirates than the others.

Which one of these was first, anyway?

Have you read the section of the "1000 page report" on Emirates? There is nothing in there that shows a subsidy other than the statement that the information is available publicly. If it's out there, why didn't they quote it?

We're basically in a he said, she said situation regarding Emirates but to level the charges that they have, I would expect a lot more than what is in that report from the US3.

Etihad put up on their company website the findings of an outside company Risk Advisory Group, which they hired to counter investigate alleged government subsidies to the Big three US carriers, finding they collectively received $71.5 billion in benefits:

http://www.etihad.com/Documents/keep...y-report-1.pdf

VERY weak case.
Bankruptcy = NOT government subsidy
PBGC = insurance program, NO government funds involved.
Fuel Subsidies = NO advantage; report acknowledges same tax rate for all commercial carriers, foreign and domestic.

Risk Advisory Group is an outside company, but they wrote exactly what Etihad wanted them to write. Their paychecks came indirectly from Etihad.