I’ve spent early last week in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, speaking at and Chairing the Pillars of Aviation conference, featuring industry stalwarts from around the world, including airline and airport heads. The conference instilled a lot of positivity in me, about the future of the sector, especially in the Asia-Pacific region.
Airports demonstrating leadership
For starters, no speakers backed out, and the conference hall was full. This may not sound significant, but it’s one of the early indicators of things getting back to normal. Among all the speeches, I was impressed by the efforts airports like Melbourne and GoldCoast are making to work in-tandem with airlines to ensure a healthy, business-driving relationship.

In fact, Malaysia Airports is doing a tremendous job creating the hub of the future, with an LCC terminal interconnected with the existing Kuala Lumpur International Airport. That means when the new LCC Terminal is ready in 2011, passengers would be able to seamlessly connect from a Cebu Pacific flight from Manila, to an AirAsia X flight to Delhi, or a Malaysia Airlines flight to London. And at a combined capacity of 53 million per year, it would be the largest airport-hub in the region.

To read more about what folks …

Last week, I was in Sydney at the Aviation Outlook Summit and on the first day of the conference, I sent out this Tweet:

Right in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Sydney, Turkish Airlines had this flagrant display of teenagers in red, visible not just to all the conference attendees but also to those passing by the hotel (see pic below). And they had totally stolen the thunder from Malaysia Airlines, which had paid thousands of dollars for being the official sponsor of the conference.

Turkish Airlines had announced its presence, and in quite some style. After spending some time with Dr Temel Kotil, the airlines’ humble CEO, I feel other competitors should be vary of the rising star from Turkey.

Why’s Turkish the atypical Middle Eastern airline?
Dr Kotil mentions a number of points in the video interview below which prove that Turkish Airlines in not yet another Middle Eastern airline with global ambitions. …