Royal Jet invests AED 175 million to bolster position as Middle East's leading private charter airline

The GFCC is designed to improve efficiency and information delivery to clients, with enquiries being passed along to individually trained specialists working with new state-of-the art IT systems.

"The GFCC is the first of its kind in the Middle East for a charter airline, and will cement Royal Jet's position as one of the leading and most competitive private airlines in the Gulf," said Christopher Crum, President and CEO, Royal Jet.

"We will conduct our own in-house training programme for each GFCC department. The implementation of this new service will increase client handling capacity due to the new structure and communication channels between ground staff, flight operations and clients."

Under the GFCC, client requirements are broken down into specific groups under two main teams; the Guest Service Team (GST) and Flight Management Team (FMT). The average training time for each main team, which consists of a total of 41 employees, is more than 200 hours. To ensure safety and quality training standards the FMT instructor is approved by the General Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA).

The new Control Center means client requirements are now supported by eight individual GFCC teams: Guest Services, which will interface with the client on ground transportation and flight reservation details; Crew Service, to co-ordinate service suppliers and crew logistics; Aircraft and Crew Scheduling and Planning, to manage flight crew duties, aircraft assignment, engineering schedules and guest services; Trip Planning which will be responsible for airport requirements, flight permissions, landing permits and long range forward planning; Flight Dispatch to provide flight plans and control flight operations; Vendor Standards Development to co-ordinate with suppliers and maintain service quality; Service Quality Development to ensure a closed-loop process of quality review, development and improvement; VIP Services which will be responsible for airport meet-and-greet and interdepartmental co-ordination; Commissary and On-board Standards to support in-flight stocking, organization and supplies maintenance.

"Each department and team is fused together so that the entire flight cycle process works as efficiently as possible. When a client enquiry is processed the required information is broken down and handled by each team. The information is then collated and the results and options given to the client. The entire process can take as little as 30 minutes from enquiry to quotation," added Abdullah AlSayed, GFCC Director.

"The new GFCC allows Royal Jet to multi-task to a much greater extent. New and existing clients will be provided with an improved service. Royal Jet will offer the GFCC services to its aircraft management customers and interested external third parties."

"Additional aircraft due to join Royal Jet's fleet in the first half of this year will further solidify our client service offering."

On delivery of the new aircraft the Royal Jet fleet will total 12 aircraft.