Emirates' Tim Clark Shares Hidden A380 Backstories

Let's start with the political environment right now.

Obviously, In the Middle East, we've gone through a period of unrest.

How is that impacting your model?

It's not nearly as bad as a lot of people would have thought.

Today, we are operating 91% of our fleet and our production.

We have only about seven of our global points, which are not operable, such as Iran and Iraq and one or two others.

The income streams, both passenger and cargo, are very strong.

In fact, better than they were this time last year.

This is a strange paradox.

Nobody would have thought, given what's going on, that is the case.

But we kept our operations intact.

We've done our best to make sure that we are meeting the requirements of the markets.

Obviously, the fact that it's still coming to us, irrespective of what may be a perception issue, the government saying don't travel across this region or It doesn't seem to have stopped people wanting to fly.

In the early weeks when it started to be a little bit more focused on the UAE, for instance, there was, you know, we didn't operate and a lot of people weren't traveling.

But after a period of time, certainly by June, July, it started to move again.

And cargo has excelled, obviously because there are some maritime choke points at the moment, which is distorting the maritime channels, traditional channels.

So a lot of the cargo that is based on just-in-time or things like pharmaceuticals or some of the production things in automotive, whatever, we're carrying a lot of those.

So cargo is a really good story taken together, but not doing badly.

Mm-hmm.

So in actual fact, what you're saying is that demand is remaining very buoyant.

What about the cost side? Obviously, fuel costs have increased.

Has that impacted your network or what you're able to do at all?

You know, we kind of...

One, with the fuel costs as it is today, we are already hedged well.

A good chunk of our fuel is hedged at much lower levels than they are today.