Air NZ chief dreams of flying 1st new Dreamliner to China

New Zealand's national carrier is to put bigger aircraft on its direct China route from July and is aiming to operate the next generation Boeing 787 Dreamliner on its China service, Air New Zealand chief executive Christopher Luxon said Tuesday.

The company currently flew Boeing 767 aircraft on its daily Auckland-Shanghai route, but would begin flying the larger Boeing 777-200, which it operated on its Hong Kong route, from July 1, Luxon told Xinhua in an interview.

"I have a personal dream which is that we are to be the global launch customer of the next version of the Dreamliner. We are getting the 787-9. The current aircraft flying in the world today is the 787-8," Luxon said at the annual TRENZ New Zealand tourism industry showcase in Auckland.

"If we can keep building China in the next 12 months, I would really like a Dreamliner to come to China first. That would be fantastic, but we've got some work to do to make sure we keep filling up the bigger aircraft from July 1," he said.

"We have 220-people aircraft; we're now moving to a 300-people aircraft; and then ultimately, we move to the state-of-the-art, the best aircraft in the world, which will be the Dreamliner-9."

Air New Zealand is scheduled to receive three of the new Boeing 787-9 aircraft, which is 6 meters longer than the 787-8, by the end of next year.

Luxon said the increasing size of aircraft on its Shanghai route reflected the huge growth in demand, which drove a 71- percent rise in passenger numbers over the last 12 months.

"That's a huge amount of growth much faster than what's been happening in the previous five years, which was 17 percent on average," he said.

Total Chinese visitor numbers to New Zealand were up about 38 percent last year to almost 200,000, and the figure was expected to keep growing.

"The challenge is that most of them claim that they'd like more connection with the people, they'd like more connection with the lifestyle and with the culture and so a lot of our focus at Air New Zealand is how can we help build itineraries that allow Chinese visitors to come to New Zealand and maybe spend a week or 10 days here," he said.

But the increase went both ways, and Air New Zealand was carrying more New Zealand visitors to China as well as cargo.

"We've had 66,000 New Zealanders go to visit China in the last year and just last week we had a whole flight come from New Zealand to watch the Formula 1 racing in Shanghai."

Luxon said China Southern Airlines, which flies direct between Guangzhou and Auckland and is the only other carrier operating daily China-New Zealand direct flight, had very little impact on Air New Zealand.

"The reality is China is so big and the awareness of New Zealand is still growing. Competition is good because in many ways it helps build the profile of New Zealand across the whole of China so we don't tend to compete for the same customers because the cities are so large."

The airline, which won the Global Tourism Business category at the World Travel and Tourism Council's annual Global Summit earlier this month, was also committed to tourism and travel, said Luxon.

"We keep working with different suppliers around biofuels and our lead scenario at the moment is more a wood-based biofuel," he said.

"The problem in New Zealand is just trying to find a way to scale it up because we have 4 million people here so we need the infrastructural scale to make it happen, but we're right on the edge of that because we keep trying to get some really innovative ways of using biofuels."