Local aviation bigwig predicts future growth of Malaga Airport

One of the great entrepreneurs of the aeronautical sector in the province, Antonio Gómez-Guillamón, visited the Malaga studios of locally produced television programme La Alameda last week to discuss the challenges facing his company and the crucial role the city's airport plays in the growth of Malaga. During the show, presented by SUR's editor-in-chief Manuel Castillo, the CEO and co-founder of Aertec Solutions considered Malaga's airport still needs to grow, which comes down to technical improvements made to the second runway and the implementation of new intercontinental routes.

Gómez-Guillamón started by explaining that his company, founded 26 years ago, now has around 750 highly qualified employees. "At the beginning nobody understood it, but today we are playing a leading role, and in the world of aeronautics it is not easy for a new company to start rubbing shoulders with the existing ones," he said.

The entrepreneur pointed out his company has a very large market niche, although they are structured in three tiers of business: planning and designing elements for airports; designing facilities for aircraft and the manufacture of unmanned aircraft useful for tracking, surveillance or target identification missions.

On the latter, he criticised overly-conservative European laws on the flying of these aircraft, which could be of great use in different fields. He used forest fire monitoring as an example: "They can be put up at night, when traditional aircraft cannot fly, giving information about where the fire is or where the flames are moving to".

Gómez-Guillamón also pointed out current problems in finding highly qualified staff. "That is a bottleneck for everyone; finding talent because it is a scarce resource," he said. Despite this, he pointed out that there tends to be respect among companies and there is no staff poaching as many of them collaborate with each other.

Gómez-Guillamón said Malaga Airport's two parallel runways do not allow for an increase in operations. However, "there is a solution from a technical point of view", he said.

In reference to the coming years, he considered Malaga as a very attractive destination for low-cost transoceanic flights, which is the future of aviation. "Now we have to continue making these flights from hubs and with this type of aircraft it will be possible to connect destinations from point to point," Gómez-Guillamón said.