Akbar al-Baker says he was stunned by the rejection given the airline was ‘so supportive of Australia’ throughout the pandemic.

The Australian authorities’s choice to dam Qatar Airways’s request for additional flights to Australia was “very unfair”, the airline’s CEO Akbar al-Baker has advised CNN in an interview.

“We discovered it to be very unfair [for] our authentic request to be not granted, particularly at a time once we have been so supportive of Australia,” al-Baker stated on Sunday, including that he was “very stunned” on the choice.

“[We were] repatriating their stranded residents from world wide to and out of Australia, serving to them obtain medical provides and spare elements and so on. throughout the COVID-19 interval,” al-Baker stated. “The nationwide service and its companions utterly stopped working in Australia. We have been there for the folks of Australia.”

The Doha-based airline had requested to fly an additional 21 companies into Australia’s main airports. However Australia’s Transport Minister Catherine King in July formally rejected its bid so as to add flights to Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, saying the proposal was not in Australia’s pursuits.

In the course of the pandemic, Qatar Airways flights to Australia continued, transporting as few as 20 folks per flight, whereas flights from Qantas, Australia’s nationwide airline, have been grounded.

“I’m all the time longing for the federal government to hearken to our case very rigorously after which decide,” the Qatar Airways CEO stated, including that it’s troublesome for him to remark as an Australian parliamentary inquiry was underneath strategy to look into the federal government choice on Qatar Airways.

“We’ve got full confidence within the authorities, within the Senate and within the parliament,” al-Baker stated.

Accusations

Earlier this week, Australian Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles stated he was not consulted when the nation’s transport minister determined to dam Qatar Airways’s request.

Final week King, the transport minister, stated that “the context” for her choice to not grant Qatar Airways extra flights was linked to invasive physique searches performed on a bunch of Australian girls at Doha’s Hamad Worldwide Airport in Qatar.

In October 2020, greater than a dozen feminine passengers have been subjected to “invasive” and “humiliating” inner exams in Qatar after a new child toddler was discovered deserted on the airport.

King’s choice confronted intense political scrutiny and he or she was accused of defending Qantas, whose former chief govt, Alan Joyce, claimed that permitting Qatar the additional capability would “distort” the native aviation market.

The airline, which has admitted to lobbying towards the Qatar Airways bid, has additionally confronted criticism over a sequence of latest controversies, together with allegations it bought about 8,000 tickets for flights it knew had already been cancelled.

Public anger in direction of the Australian service – which controls greater than 60 % of the home market – culminated in the stepping down of Joyce.

The chief of the Nationwide Get together of Australia and chair of the federal government inquiry into the choice, Bridget McKenzie, brazenly accused the federal government of protectionism.

“I imagine they’re working a safety racket for Qantas,” McKenzie stated whereas chatting with Sky Information.