Flying High With Vietnam Airlines

One of the easiest and most comfortable ways a person can travel to another country would be to travel by air. In Vietnam, one of the largest enterprises in the country is the Vietnam Airlines. The Vietnam Airlines is known to be the country's national flag carrier. It was formally established as the state's enterprise in 1989.

1995 saw a few service companies merging together in order to form the Vietnam Airlines Corporation. To oversee the company's operations, a seven-seat management board was appointed by the country's Prime Minister. For a while, Vietnam Airlines was a major stakeholder in the country's second carrier, Pacific Airlines. Vietnam Airlines used to hold around 60% stake in the other carrier. Eventually, the share of the Vietnam Airlines was transferred to Vietnam's Ministry of Finance.

In the next few years, Vietnam Airlines has one goal, and that is to increase their services to the United States of America and the United Kingdom. Vietnam is slowly experiencing great development in the area of tourism, making the goal of Vietnam Airlines more feasible and definitely profitable.

As of January 2007, the average age of the fleet of Vietnam Airlines is about 6.3 years. The airline corporation has ordered an Airbus A321-200 and a 4 Boeing 787 aircraft to help expand their already massive network. Vietnam Airlines is relatively safe, with some incidents in the past 20 years. To prevent fatal crashes from happening, Vietnam Airlines has phased out aircrafts which are considered to be high-risk when it comes to aircraft malfunctions.

Since the September 11 attack way back in 2001, Vietnam Airlines has also increased security measures in airports and passengers boarding the aircraft. New screening and X-ray equipment has been purchased by the corporation, along with it more security personnel to assist in passenger checks.

Other improvements made by the airline corporation includes plans to train more pilots to make sure that their crew and pilots would provide excellent service and ensure the safety of the airline passengers. Aside from this, Vietnam Airlines ensure the safety of their passengers by having scheduled maintenance checks. The airlines also conduct its own aircraft repair.

Today, Vietnam Airlines is now owned by the country's government. In the past few years, the airline corporation has had great growth and an increase of 37% when it comes to the number of passengers flown annually since 1997.