“We have to expand the airport to cater for the expansion of Qatar Airways,” he stressed while explaining that the ongoing first phase expansion project at HIA should be ready by the end of this year. The aim is to increase HIA's capacity to host 60mn passengers a year.
"We are releasing the space around the expansion area of the airport to move parking away from the north end of the terminal to start the construction,” al-Baker said.
While QA has nearly 300 aircraft on order with a list price of more than $70bn, al-Baker announced that they will be receiving another batch of aircraft soon.
Currently, it has a modern fleet of 190 aircraft flying to more than 150 destinations across six continents. QA Group employs more than 41,000 staff worldwide, of which more than 24,000 are airline employees.
“Our fleet expansion is progressing as planned and the only issue is that we have delays (delivery) of some of our aircraft,” he noted while asserting that QA has the youngest aircraft fleet of any airline in the world.
QA plans to continue expanding until the end of this year by launching flights to Windhoek, Namibia (four times weekly) from September 28, Helsinki, Finland (daily) from October 10, Krabi, Thailand (four times weekly) from December 6, and Seychelles (daily) from December 12.
QA has also announced plans to fly to six destinations in 2017, including Auckland, New Zealand and Sarajevo, Bosnia.