Fly4 chief sees shareholders Enter Air and TUI giving new carrier flying start

While launching an airline is never easy, the chief executive of new ACMI carrier Fly4 Airlines believes the support of shareholders Enter Air and TUI gives it a strategic headstart as it bids to establish itself as a provider of complementary capacity.

Polish charter carrier Enter Air and European travel giant TUI last year outlined plans to establish a new joint venture airline focused on providing wet- and damp-lease capacity. The partners sealed the joint venture – which is 51% owned by Enter Air and 49% by TUI – in November and the Ireland-headquartered carrier is set to launch flights this summer.

”From our perspective, when you have two shareholders that are operators in their own right – and not insignificant ones – then there is a whole opportunity there to leverage expertise and scales that a normal start-up would not have,” Fly4 managing director Jochen Schnadt tells FlightGlobal. ”So launching on that basis, we can closely co-operate with the shareholders.”

Fly4 is initially starting with four Boeing 737-800s – which have been sourced from, and will fly for, TUI on UK-based flights. Schnadt says it hopes to secure its commercial licence and air operator’s certificate (AOC) this quarter and to start flying during the second quarter. 

”We are phasing [the aircraft] in, but by late May we are hoping to have all four in operation,” he says.

”We have essentially two anchor customers from day one,” he says. ”From the TUI perspective, we are initially focusing on serving the UK tour operator as a customer. Enter Air are obviously very busy out of Poland, which is their main base, but are doing multiple other things and it depends how they develop their own commercial partnerships where they might need some additional capacity going forward.

However, the airline’s clear ambition is to develop additional third-party business. “So the question is then, in terms of moving beyond those two customers, who else is out there that we can provide services for?”

Schnadt has held senior leadership roles across carriers including BMIbaby, Monarch Airlines and Flybe – for whom he worked on the latter’s white label third-party flying programme.

“Complementary external capacity is nothing new in the industry and I think it has become quite mainstream,” he says. ”But I think what’s missing sometimes is that ’quality’ dynamic to it. We are talking about the state of the cabins, about on-time performance, about completion rates, the fundamentals which we as an operator can control.

“That’s where the drive really came from in terms of saying can we create a platform that can provide flexible capacity solutions at competitive rates but do it in such a way that it is actually focused on quality.”

While Schnadt says the airline will look at all wet-lease opportunities, it is putting a particular focus on longer-term, multi-year arrangements, which he believes will make it is easier to plan ahead, both in terms of its fleet development and the flexibility of contracts it can offer crew. 

”You can be more picky, you can start looking at a more standardised fleet,” he says, “which is why we believe we have a path that allows us to be successful.”

“At the moment we are focused on the -800s and, coming back to the quality aspect, we want to standardise the fleet as much as possible, so we will have quite a specific focus on which kind of aircraft we build [the fleet with],” he says. Schnadt notes any move to newer Boeing Max technology would need revenues that justify the higher ownership costs.

“We obviously want to get to scale,” he adds. ”I think our initial benchmark is we want to get to 10 plus [aircraft] within the first three years and beyond that certainly 20 plus. The speed will be determined by a combination of things in terms of what’s happening with our anchor customers, but equally how successful are we to find other customers as well.”

While its relationship with TUI has enabled Fly4 to secure aircraft to launch despite industry-wide availability issues, shortages of another key resource – labour – remain a challenge.

”Everybody is hiring, everybody is recruiting,” Schnadt says. “As a start-up – coming back to the quality aspect – we have made it clear we going for experienced people only in phase one, before we then look at cadets.”

Fly4 in December teamed up with crew resource specialist AAP Aviation to support its recruitment drive.

”For year one, we need to find ourselves a good set of experienced people to get going. Our hope is by doing what we are doing off the back of two customers that we have from day one, off the back of building the business model looking for longer-term partnerships with customers, we are therefore able to offer some lifestyle choices and they will potentially find us attractive,” he says.

While current aircraft shortages present challenges in scaling up an airline, it does mean demand for wet-lease capacity has arguably never been stronger – a situation which could persist for several years yet.

”That is clearly advantageous for us in terms of what we are looking to do,” Schnadt says, describing this as a tactical opportunity. But he also sees airline requirements for additional capacity driven by structural changes to demand in the post-Covid environment, with a shift from domestic business traffic to more seasonal leisure travel.

”There is virtually no carrier out there that is not looking at complementary capacity in one shape or form,” he says. ”So given where the industry is, I think we are seeing opportunities out there.

”The challenge is on us to make sure we deliver on this quality aspect,” Schnadt adds. ”But if we can do that, and I see no reason why we can’t with everything that is at our disposal, I genuinely believe there is a scalable opportunity out there.”