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BERLIN—Emirates President Tim Clark predicts the airline will return to normal operations quickly if the situation in the Middle East stabilizes in the next two to four weeks.
“We will get back to where we were in February fairly soon,” Clark told attendees of the CAPA Airline Leader Summit on April 23 in his first interview since the beginning of the Iran war.
“We have had a lot of issues in this part of the world in the last 40 years,” said Clark, who was speaking remotely. “The draw of Dubai has produced an economic model that is the envy of the planet. Power is very strong. It will not take much for Emirates to get back in the saddle.”
“I have been through worse than this,” he added. “We are not going to allow [the airline] to falter or slow down.”
Emirates is currently at 65% of normal operations and plans to resume service to all pre-crisis destinations in the coming weeks. “We have a history of restoring operations very rapidly,” he said. Emirates returned to some level of flying four days after the start of the war. “We were under a degree of threat, but it did not stop us from getting this airline up and running again.”
According to Clark, the aircraft are “surprisingly full” and connecting flows through Dubai are returning and are growing on a daily basis. “We will still be the most profitable airline in the world, in spite of March being wiped out,” he said. The airline has yet to disclose its financial result of its 2025-26 financial year which ran through March.
Management has no intention of changing any of the airline’s investment plans and will stick to its existing aircraft orders, Clark said. Also, the carrier will continue the major retrofit program of its Airbus A380 and Boeing 777-300ER fleet and the installation of Starlink antennas for high-speed internet. The retrofit program has been made somewhat easier because a lot of aircraft are on the ground anyway, Clark noted.
Even though European airlines and regulators are warning of a possible shortage of jet fuel, Clark is “not that concerned.” In his view there is “adequate supplies of fuel.” To him, the question is more one of the long term effect of the price of fuel that “goes against possible demand growth.” On the other hand, “the strength of demand is so high, we know the demand will take price increases. There is a bow wave of demand just like after COVID and then the normal demand.”
Clark does believe that “refineries are more of a problem.”
Emirates moved to a new operations control center at its Dubai headquarters just months before the latest conflict. Clark praised how Emirates' management dealt with the crisis. “In times like this you need leadership. But [the team] is on the same page as I am. It is all about team work.”
He rejected the notion that more autonomy of Europe’s air transport industry is needed, which has been raised by some of Europe’s airline leaders including Lufthansa Group CEO Carsten Spohr. “Emirates has been building markets in the same countries that the others failed to recognize. They did not take the opportunity that they could have. People have lost the plot,” he said.
Clark took a direct stab at Lufthansa, too, saying they were instead working “to cobble together a very strange group of airlines” and at the same time “cannot even get the main airline running.”
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