2023-12-18 15:00:00
AOM, Air Liberté, Euralair, XL Airways, Aigle Azur… The cemetery of French air carriers is regularly filling up and Fnam, the federation of companies, notes that the market shares of French international traffic are falling year after year. of one percent.
In this turbulent sky, Air Caraibes has been developing for twenty years, supported by a single shareholder, the Vendée family group Dubreuil. Jean-Paul, the paterfamilias, who has just handed over control to his son Paul-Henri, had dabbled in passenger transport in 1974 creating Air Vendée. A small nine-seater twin-engine aircraft linked La Roche-sur-Yon to the island of Yeu and the staff included, in addition to Jean-Paul, a secretary, a pilot and a mechanic. Twenty years later, the structure became Regional Airlines, the largest regional company in Europe, which Dubreuil sold to Air France, which was too afraid that British Airways or Lufthansa would take it over.
Common sense, the key to success
What to do with this cash? Jean-Paul Dubreuil then met Marc Rochet, an engineer who had worked extensively in the management of airlines. This former Air Inter employee, among other things, managed the Antilles flights of Aéromaritime, a subsidiary of UTA, turned around AOM until Chirac appointed one of his friends to manage the assets of Crédit Lyonnais.
READ ALSO Air France: five questions surrounding the transfer from Orly to Roissy-CDGThe two men quickly agreed to create a transatlantic company to the French West Indies, a service for which, with the shutdown of Air Lib, there were only two operators, Air France and Corsair. The decision was taken in September 2003 and the first Orly-Pointe-à-Pitre-Fort-de-France flight took place on the following December 12. “One of our strengths, we make decisions very quickly, we move quickly,” says Marc Rochet, who puts the success of Air Caraibes into perspective. There is no secret to success, it’s just 99% common sense. This airline was run like a normal business, it was successful thanks to its staff and the shareholder. Often, in the air, we react conservatively. Clearly, we do not necessarily stop routes that lose money. We are a private company, without state shareholders, we must be profitable. It’s very simple, a route wins or loses and if it loses money, we stop it. » This was the case of Saint-Martin and Cuba, in particular. When it was created, the business plan gave three years to break even. It was achieved in eighteen months…
It will then be a succession of profitable years, except 2011 (aftermath of the financial shock of 2010) and the Covid-19 years. Note that purchases of aircraft serving the Antilles benefit from tax exemption, a system which interests the very profitable Dubreuil group. “Air travel represents a third of the group’s activity and is growing at approximately the same speed as distribution,” underlines Paul-Henri, the new CEO. “Covid was experienced as a bit of an injustice because all the other airlines were financially helped by the State… except us,” laments Marc Rochet. As we were robust before the crisis, we had nothing. The moral of the story is that we help the bad and not the good. Of course, we had other aid, those which apply to everyone, but not to the airline sector. We negotiated a collective performance agreement with our unions, they accepted a 10% pay cut over two years. To compensate for this effort, I made two commitments: no PSE and we are retaining our aircraft orders. »
Air Caraibes knew how to choose the right planes at the right times. At the start, these were rented under the best conditions created by the bankruptcies of carriers in Germany and Switzerland. With growth, this also makes it possible to then exchange an Airbus A330-200 with 303 seats for an A330-300 with 354 seats and to keep up with demand.
The A350, the best plane of its generation
“We are very attentive to the choice of our fleet, the essential questions in our business remain the following: which aircraft do we use? How do we set it up and how do we make it fly? indicates Marc Rochet. With Jean-Paul Dubreuil, we decided to buy the A350, which is clearly the best plane of its generation. We were the first to put them online in France. They were designed to have nine seats in economy class. We decided to put not nine but ten seats, which made us more profitable. To compensate for the fact that customers are a little tighter, we reduced the aisles a little and installed a very efficient video system. » The first A350s arrived in 2017, assigned to Orly-Pointe-à-Pitre and Orly-Fort-de-France. Today, the A350-1000 (429 seats) operate up to three daily flights to each island. Passengers particularly appreciate the quality of the cabin pressurization. The pressure corresponds to 1,500 meters, the altitude of a mid-mountain resort, compared to 2,200 meters for previous generation aircraft.
READ ALSO A350 dispute: Airbus and Qatar Airways avoid a very expensive lawsuitWith French Bee, the low-cost little sister created in 2017, the Dubreuil group operates twenty Airbuses. Another A350-1000 is expected in December 2024. Its destinations are kept secret, but as it is tax-exempt, it can only be the French West Indies and Guyana or Reunion. Note that a fourth ATR will be put online on the Saint-Martin-Pointe-à-Pitre-Fort-de-France route to remedy the failure of Air Antilles whose planes are still grounded.
Air Caraibes’ first Airbus still flies but for the Republic
For its first transatlantic flight on December 12, 2003, Air Caraibes operated between Orly and Pointe-à-Pitre an Airbus A330-200 registered F-OPTP with the serial number 240. This was leased to ILFC because the young airline does not (yet) have the means to acquire wide-body aircraft. Five years later, the F-OPTP was returned in exchange for an A330-300 offering more seats. ILFC, the world’s largest rental company, is looking for liquidity. Its position as a subsidiary of the American insurer AIG put it at the heart of the 2008 financial crisis. The Directorate General for Armaments (DGA), which reports to the Ministry of Defense, is looking for a second-hand long-haul vehicle that can be converted into presidential plane, and bought this A 330-200 msn 240 for 60 million euros. Ten years old, this plane has only 45,000 flight hours and 7,500 cycles (takeoff and landing sequences with pressurization). The same device released new from the Toulouse factories would have cost nearly 180 million euros. In all cases there is added the layout of the cabin and special equipment which was the subject of a long project in Bordeaux-Mérignac at Sabena Technics (formerly Sogerma).
But perhaps, like hundreds of thousands of French people, you have already traveled aboard the future presidential plane, then registered F-OPTP when it linked Orly to Pointe-à-Pitre and Fort-de-France in the colors of Air Caribbean? In the Elysian version, the 324 seats of the transatlantic airliner have disappeared. All that remains is the “bodywork” with the fuselage, wings and engines; the interior was completely gutted and then redone.
Schematically, we can divide presidential A 330 into nine volumes.
- just behind the cockpit, the presidential bedroom is fitted out with a double bed and a dressing room. In the bathroom, there is a shower
- the presidential lounge has a desk and armchairs around a coffee table
- a secretarial space
- a kitchen where, as on all planes, we do not prepare dishes but we heat them
- a telecommunications room (VHF, HF, satellite) where encryption equipment is located which makes it possible to maintain confidential connections with the ground. Orders related to nuclear deterrence can also be transmitted.
- A soundproofed meeting room with an oval table and eleven seats.
- What has sometimes been called a “hospital” is an infirmary space allowing in particular to provide care in the event of medical repatriation.
- A 60-seat cabin for attendants who have work equipment to communicate with the ground, including high-speed Internet. These ten rows of armchair beds similar to those in business class are arranged 2 x 2 x 2.
- At the very rear, an economy cabin is reserved for crew members and bodyguards.
Even the cockpit has undergone some alterations. Indeed, this A 330-200 registered F-OPTP was the victim of a speed information failure at the beginning of September 2008, quite similar to that which caused the crash of the Air France 447 Rio-Paris in June 2009. Thanks mainly to the skill of the Air Caraibes crew, loss of control was avoided. A report from the pilots was sent to the supervisory authorities and to Airbus. But, at Air France, feedback from small companies is rarely taken into account. The Pitot probes were, of course, immediately changed by Air Caraibes.
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