Qatar Airways will seek compensation from Boeing over the grounding of three 737 MAX aircraft by Air Italy, according to Al Jazeera. Qatar Airways is a 49 per cent shareholder of the Italian airline.
Boeing MAX aircraft were grounded worldwide and airlines have cancelled multimillion-dollar contracts following crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed nearly 350 people. “At Qatar Airways, we do not operate any MAX airplanes – it affected our investment into Air Italy,” said Qatar Airways Group CEO Akbar Al Baker on Friday.
He added: “Air Italy has three MAX operated in its fleet and they were grounded, so it affected us. We had to take extra routing from outside. Boeing has to compensate us for grounding.”
Meanwhile, Qatar Airways is in talks to buy a 20 per cent stake in Vnukovo airport, Moscow’s third-largest by passenger traffic. Al Baker said Qatar Airways was looking to close the deal “sometime before the end of the year’. Last year, Vnukovo International Airport handled about 21 million passengers compared with 29 million at Domodedovo and almost 46 million at Sheremetyevo, Russia’s biggest airport.
“Sheremetyevo and Domodedovo are already congested and the only airport that has an expansion opportunity is Vnukovo. We see a huge potential to grow the airport to bring more traffic, to intensify traffic, to grow there, to increase the duty-free footprint,” Al Baker said.