Travelling In The Aircraft To The Motherland Of The Emirates
Not many Americans think of Dubai as a weekend making a leave, but I do. For a trip last February, I flew nonstop from New York for 13 hours aboard the partially state-owned carrier Emirates, which bumped me up to business class and proposed me a tour of first, where the seats have 19-inch screens, personal mini-bars, and even their private doors – each a self-enclosed pod. Two days later, I was in the back of the Airbus with what felt like half of Mumbai, chewing on a draught at 4:30 a.m. and e-mailing friends from above the Nile.
In the next six years, Emirates flight Dubai purposes to amass the world’s largest armada of long-haul aircraft. With 55 Airbus A380 “super jumbos” and 51 Boeing 777′s on order, the carrier is spearheading a provincial attempt to funnel two-thirds of flights between Europe and Asia through the Persian Gulf and to become America’s gateway to India.
The fact that Dubai’s airline aspires to have the biggest, fastest-growing, and most beneficial fleet on earth isn’t surprising when you think the state’s outsize ambitions. But urban jealousy and Emirates’ phenomenal fortune have inspired the leaders of nearby Qatar and Abu Dhabi to bulk up their own national porters. Both Qatar Airways and Abu Dhabi’s Etihad Airways – the youngest of the group – have purchased A380′s of themselves, and all three porters are in a race to woo affluent travelers with new and improved business- and first-class products.
“There’s never been this much concentration of aircrafts in such a small area, ” Kirk Albrow, Etihad’s general manager for Europe and the Americas, says. “And with airplanes that can fly 15 hours nonstop, you can go anywhere in the world from here. We’ve redrawn the map.”
The Boston Consulting Group issued a document in September 2006 describing these Mideast carriers collectively as a grave threat to other airlines. Working with a combination of low operating prices, cheap labor pools, tax-free home bases, and powerful support for tourism promotion, the Mideast airlines intend to low prices and over-deliver on the experience, removing layovers into luxury stays with vacation packages in rain-free, tax-free resorts. Most of Dubai’s manmade Palm islands Dubai rooms and the first phase of the magnificent Dubai land theme park are expected to be completed within a decade, and Abu Dhabi is hoping for the Bilbao effect, when star-chitects Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel, and Tadao Ando unveil a quartet of world-class museums.
Those gravitations are expected to draw an enormous amount of Americans. Emirates have three daily flights between New York and Dubai and is plunging service to Houston in December, whereas there are talks that it is also eyeing San Francisco and Chicago. Etihad has flights to New York and Toronto, and Qatar route flights to New York and Washington, D.C., this summer.
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