KM Malta Airlines, the new national carrier, has taken off from where Air Malta left after serving the country for 50 years. This latest chapter in the country’s aviation history must deliver social and economic benefits through the right policies to deliver affordable, sustainable air travel to Maltese and foreign citizens.
The birth of a new enterprise is always a cause for celebration. However, the new airline must cruise the overcrowded European skies more successfully than its predecessor.
The Malta Hotels and Restaurants Association president and former Air Malta director, Tony Zahra, made a concise and fair comment about the history of the national carrier in the last 50 years.
He argues that Air Malta played a pivotal role in shaping Malta’s economic and social landscape, adding that the airline was sometimes exploited for short-term gain, “ultimately leading to its unfortunate closure”. The new airline must learn from Air Malta’s past failures.
The stories relating to the management and performance of a national airline always arouse public interest.
The decision of KM Malta to no longer make the Maltese language a requirement for all cabin crew caused a controversy that risks relegating the importance of the airline’s significant challenges.
Rafael Schvartzman, IATA’s Regional Vice President for Europe, recently commented: “European airlines have some major challenges ahead of them and are still in a fragile state. The market is extremely competitive, and now, more than ever, we need to ensure that European airlines deliver affordable, sustainable travel.”
In the case of Malta, one of the significant challenges is for the national airline to carve enough market share to compete with giant airlines like Ryanair. Last September, Ryanair’s boss, Michael O’Leary, told Times of Malta that the country “knows it can always rely on Malta Air, (the Malta-based Ryanair subsidiary)”. O’Leary added a realistic but painful comment: “In the new world of European aviation, you need to be one of the big four airlines to survive and thrive.”
Today, EU regulators consider national legacy carriers less than an economic necessity despite the political arguments made by some member states. It was, therefore, wise for local policymakers to encourage low-cost airlines like Malta Air to serve the local and European travel markets from Malta.
Like some other European countries, Malta’s aviation industry faces infrastructure issues that are challenging to resolve. Malta’s tourism industry has grown substantially in the last several years, mainly thanks to low-cost air travel. The local infrastructure, including the airport facilities, is pressured to provide efficient service to travellers. It is delusional for stakeholders in the air travel industry to continue to rely on game-changing capacity improvements.
Sustainability will remain a significant challenge for the tourism industry and airline operators. While air travel has picked up significantly in Mediterranean destinations, including Malta, following the pandemic, the geopolitical scenario in Europe remains ominous. It is difficult to predict how the Ukraine war will evolve and how economic and political developments will affect the travel market in the next few years.
KM Malta Airlines faces a challenging future that everyone hopes will be more encouraging than Air Malta’s, which, for various reasons, could not cruise the European skies successfully when the aviation industry was liberalised a few decades ago.
Hopefully, taxpayers will no longer have to underwrite any future financial failures of the new airline.