One airline on the planet plans to extend the scale of its fleet fivefold by ordering more planes at one time than some other carrier on the planet. Lion Air, a budget Indonesian airline mainly operating flights to Southeast Asia and its surrounding areas, has 443 planes on order, bringing its current total to 113. American Airlines, the world’s largest airline, has just 285 planes on order.
Last week, Boeing delivered the first-ever Boeing 737 Max to Lion Air’s Malaysian wing, Malindo Air, the most important single buyer of the manufacturer’s latest super-efficient jet, because the low-cost carrier plans to expand at an aggressive pace. In November 2011, Lion Air placed a record order with Boeing price $22 billion, surpassing Emirates’ previous amount, for roughly 29 737-900 aircraft and 201 latest 737 Max aircraft. It also has orders placed with Airbus for the A330-300.
Lion Air, which flies to 126 destinations in Indonesia, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and China, is Asia’s second-largest airline after Tony Fernandes’ AirAsia, however the carrier is working hard to take the highest spot.
“Very [of its] services are domestic and canopy over 100 destinations in Indonesia alone, but are expanding to international markets,” said John Grant, senior analyst at OAG, which prepared a report on orders placed by the world’s leading carriers.
“Perhaps most interestingly, there’s little awareness outside Indonesia of Lion Air’s size and the impressive growth it has experienced over the past seven years.
“For Lion Air, this order reflects the fact that Indonesia is one of the fastest growing air travel markets. Both the B737 and A320 are very popular aircraft, so securing places in the production schedule and placing such large orders is in line with their ambitions, market development and demand for the aircraft.”
Founded in 1999, Lion Air has almost doubled the variety of seats served on its routes over the past seven years, from 25.1 million to 48.7 million. The average flight time between destinations is just over an hour and a half.
The airline was founded in October 1999 by brothers Rusdi and Kusnan Kiran and started operations on June 30, 2000, commencing scheduled passenger services between Jakarta and Denpasar using a leased Boeing 737-200. It was the primary low-cost airline in Indonesia. The fleet was quickly expanded through wet leasing of 5 Yakovlev Yak-42Ds, 2 McDonnell Douglas MD-82s and a couple of sub-leased Airbus A310-300s.
Rapid development enabled the modernization of the fleet with Boeing 737-300 and Boeing 737-400 aircraft. In 2003, a subsidiary, Wings Air, was established to operate flights on less dense routes. Further subsidiaries were established, including Malindo Air in Malaysia in 2012, Thai Lion Air in Thailand in 2013, and domestically, Batik Air, a full-service subsidiary, also in 2013.
In the 2000s, Lion Air began to expand and develop into a serious rival to Garuda Indonesia for domestic air travel in Indonesia. By mid-2015, Lion Air had increased Indonesia’s share of the domestic air travel market by 41.6%, while Garuda Indonesia got here second with a share of 23.5%. Sriwajaya Air was in third place with a market share of 10.4 percent, followed by Garuda’s low-cost subsidiary Citilink (8.9 percent) and regional airline service Wings Air Lion Air (4.7 percent). Indonesia’s AirAsia, a unit of Malaysian low-cost airlines, had 4.4% market share.
Source and reference:
- Telegraph
- Boeing.com
- Wikipedia.com
