With Air Baltic, Martin Gauss only runs a fairly small airline, but he is still quite well known in the aviation industry. For years he trundled from one air show to the next to tell his listeners about the advantages of the short and medium-haul aircraft Airbus A220 to convince who has ordered his Air Baltic in large quantities. He even went on a tour of Asia with one of the planes, as if he were employed in the sales department at Airbus. He was also concerned with the image and the interest of potential investors in his airline. But from the outside it sometimes seemed as if the job in the Latvian capital Riga had become a bit too boring.
That has changed fundamentally. Gauss had to steer the airline through the corona pandemic and at the same time convince the Latvian government to ensure the survival of the company with a capital increase and 250 million euros. And now Russia’s war in Ukraine, which is hitting airlines in Eastern Europe like Air Baltic particularly hard.
As head of Air Baltic, Martin Gauss employs people from Latvia, Russia and the Ukraine.
(Photo: Mihkel Maripuu/imago/Scanpix)
Gauss once gave up his studies in order to be able to fly as a pilot with the Deutsche BA (DBA). He quickly became a captain on the Boeing there 737, and soon he was pushing into management as well. When the entrepreneur Hans-Rudolf Wöhrl bought the DBA in 2003, Gauss also took a ten percent stake and became managing director. Three years later the two sold the company to Air Berlin and Gauss was a rich man. But his career as an airline manager was only just beginning: he managed the small German company Cirrus. He then joined the chronically deficit Hungarian state line Malev, but was only able to liquidate it. He has been with Air Baltic for more than ten years – for two years in permanent crisis mode.
Before the war, Air Baltic did good business in Ukraine. From its hub in the Latvian capital Riga, it flew to Lviv, Kyiv and Odessa, among other destinations, and had passengers change at its home base for connections throughout Europe. At the end of February, with the beginning of the war, that was over. Although the Ukraine accounts for only seven percent of sales for the Latvian airline, bookings in Germany and in the home market have also initially fallen by around 30 percent compared to internal forecasts. “People just wait and see,” says Gauss. He believes and hopes that the business is not completely lost, but that the passengers will book later. Despite everything, the declines have become a little smaller in the past few days.
But booking curves are not the focus right now. Rather, how it was possible in the early days of the war to get the Ukrainian employees out of Kyiv in a dramatic way, by car and with a dedicated cell phone line to Riga, so that nobody got lost. In Riga, Gauss is experiencing “extreme solidarity, a close connection” with the victims of the war. “You can feel it every day on the street,” says Gauss. After all, Latvia borders Russia and was part of the Soviet Union. Internally, too, Air Baltic has to deal with the reality of war: “We employ Latvians, Russians and Ukrainians, we all have to get along with each other,” says Gauss.
Five planes are currently flying for Eurowings
When the war began, Air Baltic acted immediately: “We were the first to stop flying to Russia,” says the airline boss, even though the airspace was still open. “No one wants to have an asset in Russia now.” In addition, the management has decided not to fly to Russia permanently, at least the flights have been removed from the booking system for a year. Russia was recently only a small market for the Latvian airline, because the Russian corona vaccine Sputnik is still not approved in the European Union, which makes air travel impossible even against the virus of vaccinated Russians. Before Corona, the connections were much closer.
So Russia is passé for the time being, but Gauss hopes to send his machines back to Ukraine as soon as possible. “We could fly tonight,” he says, but of course it will take much longer than a few hours. When the time comes, there will initially be no scheduled connections, but “humanitarian flights” because aviation is “perfect for reconstruction”.
Until then, the planes that are not now flying to Ukraine and Russia will have to be deployed elsewhere. The airline has leased five jets, including crews, to Eurowings for the summer. Almost a third of the current 35 machines are to be used on behalf of other shareholders, because in the current situation Air Baltic is too big for the demand in the Baltic States.