Can Sri Lanka become an aviation hub?

By Sarath de Alwis

Tracing my roots to traditional marketing times in aviation and tourism, I am awed by the enormous potential of modern technologies that bring new frontiers to our doorstep; drop new vistas virtually on our laptops.

Then I am appalled to see what unfolds. Global opportunities are whisked away from our grasp by our competitors who are not so blessed by topography, terrain, climate and other assets that we hold. I ask, why?

Kishore Mahbubani, a great Singaporean, says: “Singapore is world class.” True. In a world that is often not world class, Singapore with its consistency in being ahead of the edge it can claim to be that. Why can we not lay claim to be the marvel of the ‘Marvellous Asia’?

It is indeed theatre

With all the time in the world at my fingertips I browse the unfolding theatre on my desktop and I weep. It is indeed theatre. Else how can I explain the masks we wear? How can we accept our clumsy steps and explain the off-note rhythms?

What nature has denied to our competitors is compensated by their sense of commitment and a desire to learn. This makes them succeed. We do not bother to learn. We find learning tiresome. We imitate. We find imitating easy.

Our competitors make mistakes. Then they make amends. We too make mistakes. We explain. We often fail to mend. They then avoid mistakes. We contrive to arrive at mistakes. They think in terms of time and space. They think that they need to save time. They strive to relate utility to space.

We can afford to spend time. We presume that we can afford to. We tend to be grand with space. We like to think big. We are serenely spatial. They know who matters. They know that the people who use their services and buy their products are the people who matter. To them it is a simple proposition.

Indeed we too know that these people matter. Yet to us a pleased client is not a proposition. To us it is a statistic. It is related to some piece of bronze that we hold very dear.  Instead of being preachy let us use up some time and space to do the right things for the right reasons. For a change let us imitate those who compete with us in services and manufacturing.

I never thought that I would ever publicly discuss the subject of marketing after 1997 when I retired.

I have been content to watch grandchildren grow up and tell my friends occasionally that I and my ailments are both doing fine.

Then something snapped. On 31 December 2011 at the Vijitha Yapa bookshop on Thurston Road, I was greeted by a still-active colleague. He graciously recollected some of my turbulent days in South Africa.

That conversation has wrapped me up in a deep melancholia, from which I need to escape. That compels me to write these thoughts.

That great Italian mind Da Vinci says, “for once you have tasted flight, you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return”.

As I said earlier, I could now browse the sky and the clouds in the comfort of my den and pass on some thoughts. I hope that some of them will make some marketing sense for the benefit of the generation that matters to me.

Aviation hub

I recently read an assessment made by the Marketing Chief of SriLankan Airlines of the promise held by the vibrancy of the economies and the demography of China, Indonesia and India.

I am sure he is right. Given our size and the share of the pie that we seek, we may well mange to do that.

But then, have we not planned to be an aviation hub? With Europe in Recession, Russia will sell her gas to China. Aung Sang Su Ky or who follows her will open Myanmar, which will create a more vibrant ASEAN in east Asia. India with all her folly will be very much up and running with the best entrepreneurial class in the world exploiting their demographic dividend.

When I see our GPS and the route network of our national carrier and others who touch Colombo, I find that we are not well placed to be in the hub. In fact we presently feed competing hubs in the Middle East and the Far East because in the context of South and South East Asia, we are in one corner of a quadrangle. Someone can correct me if I am wrong. (Once I was offered that privilege of correcting someone. I had to turn down the offer because he was so wrong so often that it would have been a fulltime occupation).

This digression could not be avoided as I was reminded of this episode when I started thinking how I could come up with a solution to place ourselves at the centre of the hub with the spokes covering the globe. In this age I presume we are all in the same league, playing the global game.

In 1997 the Indian consulates of Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town issued an average of around 300 visas to visit India. I say this from memory. It could be more but definitely not less. Air Lanka, which operated the twice-weekly flights for some six months connecting Johannesburg and Durban with Colombo, had an overnight connection to Madras and an equally-annoying connection to Delhi.

The Tokyo-Colombo flight and the Hong Kong-Colombo flight could not be connected to the South African flights. In the accidental meeting on 31 December I learnt that the largest Japanese tour operator which relied on Air Lanka to be a hub connecting Tokyo with Johannesburg lost a great deal of money after the Air Lanka withdrawal of the service.

In 1997 Air Lanka was indeed a hub. It was a hub of intrigue and one-upmanship by a motley collection of mediocre minds. They succeeded in convincing those at the helm to fly to Sydney and Melbourne instead of Durban and Johannesburg. This it did may be with some great profit to someone. It was definitely not for the airline.

The South African operation was, as my colleague reminded me at our recent meeting, “virtually assassinated”. His words. Not mine.

Complete the cover

The readers may now understand my melancholia. Today SriLankan flies to three capitals of the BRIC countries – China, Russia and India. It needs to complete the cover with Brazil and South Africa.

Cassandras notwithstanding, there is indeed a logic to include the growth economies of Brazil and South Africa in today’s context of the euro staring at its possible extinction. The aviation industry is essentially a license to lose. It is an old adage but yet relevant, unless a pooling of resources by the respective carriers in the five countries are concluded, with Sri Lanka being the promoter hub operator.

This is a suggestion that will necessarily pooh-poohed by the sceptics. It is not quite outlandish. Let us not forget that Galle was global two millennia before the WTO was formed. Cosmas Indicopluestas mentions Galle as a stop for ships and sailors of the Levant in the sixth century of the first millennium.

My contention is not based on the early maritime history of the island. It is based on the interesting discovery of Professor Danny Quah of the London School of Economics. I need to quote him at some length. He writes in an article entitled the ‘Shifting Centre of Gravity of the World Economy’:

“By 2008, however, because of the continuing rise of India, China and the rest of East Asia, that centre of gravity had shifted to a point just outside Izmir Turkey, east of Helsinki and Bucharest – a drift of 3,000 miles, or about three quarters of the Earth’s radius. My projection has it that this move east will continue until 2050 when the world economic centre of gravity will cluster on the border between India and China, 400 miles east of Kathmandu.”

Approaching the completion of the psalmist’s three scores and 10 years in 2012, I for one will not hesitate to take Professor Danny Quah seriously myself for at least the first decade of his “next 50 years” with some serious planning.

The unquenched thirst of both China and India for depleting natural resources is a fact of life. The growing Chinese community in Africa will be an internationally mobile community that awaits exploitation by us. The Chinese and Indians seeking resources in Australasia will not require the Colombo or Mattala hub. Travelling to Africa they will – if they find our proposition as one “that they could not possibly refuse”.

I had the pleasure of a visit by my favourite niece in December, who now lives Down Under. I was reasonably surprised that her son had Googled for the best bargain in December to Sri Lanka. He has travelled Sydney-Colombo via Doha for a little under 1,000 Australian Dollars with two of his friends of Indian ancestry travelling further on to Chennai. Thereby hangs the tale of a hub that needs to arrest accumulating missed opportunities.

(The writer was a former Country Manager, Japan of Air Lanka – currently SriLankan Airlines – when the national carrier began services to Tokyo in July 1984. He also served as Manager for the national carrier in Maldives, Germany and London among other locations. He can be reached via email [email protected].)