Riyadh Air, a Saudi start-up carrier, plans to begin its first flights in 2025, which will be preceded by issuing an AOC (Air Operators Certificate) by the end of 2024, Aviation Week reports.
“We’re into route-proving flights at the moment,” Riyadh Air CEO Tony Douglas told delegates at Routes World 2024 in Bahrain. “We’re days away from completing that process. We’ll have an AOC by the end of the year.”
A project like Riyadh Air is unprecedented in the aviation industry, which means starting an airline from scratch, up to 39 wide-body aircraft and over 100 destinations in the first five years of operation. The project is all the more fascinating because the functioning and operation of the entire airline were established long before the arrival of the first aircraft, as evidenced by numerous contracts with other carriers, some even with airlines such as Delta. In this spirit, the CEO of Riyadh Air, Tony Douglas, stated that the carrier does not plan to join any alliance but plans to build its own network with partner carriers worldwide.
Riyadh Air plans to begin flight operations with the Boeing 787-9, of which 39 are on order with 33 options. It is assumed that the carrier will also order narrow-body aircraft, the model and number of these aircraft are not publicly known.
The next major milestone in the business of the newly founded carrier is the launch of a booking platform, which is planned between October 28 and 30, and Aviation Week reports that the CEO of Riyadh announced a transformation compared to the systems as we know them. Namely, the innovation is the passenger’s biometrics, with which the passenger will be able to communicate with the carrier and all its digital services through facial recognition.