ANDREW HOFTON

Andy Hofton has acted as senior advisor to aircraft manufacturers such as Airbus, British Aerospace and Embraer. He has run training courses for aircraft manufacturers including Airbus, Embraer, Fokker, Dornier and Saab. He has extensive experience of consulting for airlines and airports worldwide on planning and business strategy, management development and training programs, benchmarking, airline and airport performance enhancement, aerospace industry infrastructure development and evaluations of alternative fleet options together with setting up small airlines. He has also acted as senior advisor to the British Airports Authority, Bahrain International Airport, Argentine Airports, Malaysia Airports Holdings Berhad and many other Airport and Civil Aviation Authorities. He has worked extensively with aircraft lessors and aerospace divisions of banks on product evaluation and risk analysis.

As a senior aviation management consultant, he has worked for a large number of organizations including Aeromexico, Air Malawi, Nigeria Airways, British Airways, Singapore Airlines, Thai International, Virgin Atlantic, Easy Jet, Malaysian Airlines, PMB (Asset Holding Company of MAS),Vietnam Airlines, the Belgian Air Force, the UK CAA, the Swedish CAA, British Aerospace, Marshall Aerospace and the World Bank. Most of these assignments have involved forecasting, market research, market planning, airline evaluation, aircraft evaluation, route evaluation, network development, business plan development, airline business performance improvement and trend analysis for airlines and airports.

For ten years was Head of the Faculty of Air Transport Management at Cranfield University, UK and responsible for the MSc and PhD degrees in Air Transport Management. He is a former editor of Aviation Economist magazine and technical editor of Flight International. He began his career in the Future Projects Office of British Aerospace where he worked on performance and cost trade offs of new aircraft.

Between 1996 and 1999 he was Managing Consultant at Speedwing, the consultancy and IT division of British Airways, where his main areas of specialization included corporate planning, route evaluation, fleet planning, trend analysis, benchmarking and airline performance improvement.

His assignments with Speedwing included feasibility studies and business plans for start-up airlines in Western Europe, West Africa, Middle East and Latin America. He also led diagnostic exercises for a number of developing airlines and played a major role in designing and implementing a successful performance improvement program for Aeromexico.

With Cranfield, he contributed to several studies for the European Commission on the effects of airline liberalization. He has also worked on airport privatization projects in Argentina with UBS, in Bosnia Herzegovina and Malawi for the World Bank, in Bulgaria with Speedwing and in the Philippines with Rolls-Royce & Partners Finance. He has acted as Specialist Advisor to the UK House of Lords on air transport liberalization, air transport industry, air traffic management and aircraft noise and environmental issues within the European Union’s member states.

In 2002, he joined ACG-UK as Senior Partner and Consultant. In this capacity he has worked on a wide number of assignments in Europe, Africa, Middle East and Asia Pacific. The projects have involved diagnostics for business performance improvement for major airlines such as Virgin Atlantic, Kenya Airways, Vietnam Airlines, Malaysia Airlines and some smaller start up airlines where the focus was on bottom up traffic forecasting, route and network development leading to fleet plan and business plan development. Other special projects involving preparing and developing airline customers for major aerospace manufacturers involving Rolls-Royce of the UK and Embraer Aircraft of Brazil are been carried out for the airline markets of mainland China and Asia Pacific. Work is been carried out for the Swedish CAA on benchmarking of European low cost airline and airport costs. A special project is currently been carried out for Malaysia Airlines on developing their environmental strategy plan to make the company ISO 14001 compliant according to new regulations for operating into and out of EU markets. A project is been carried out for the Malaysian Government for creating a world class AeroTech Park at the old international airport Subang. A major feasibility study has just been concluded for the Berjaya Group of Malaysia for passive investment in the air cargo sector. Project work has been done for Malaysia Airport Holdings Berhad (Owner of all international and domestic airports of Malaysia) in advising the board on Airport Strategy and management development programs for managers and executives. A number of studies were carried out for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development into airline investment strategies for the former Central European Countries.

He has a MSc in Aircraft Design from Cranfield University, and a BSc in Aeronautical Engineering from the University of Bristol, UK.