SriLankan Air’s Growth Ambitions Curbed by Debt, CEO Say

Bloomberg - SriLankan Airlines should ideally double its fleet over the next five years, but is constrained by debt issues and the government’s poor financial situation, according to Chief Executive Officer Richard Nuttall.

The carrier operates an all-Airbus SE fleet of 24 jets, split evenly between long-haul and short-haul routes.

“Ideally our fleet should be double what it is in five years,” Nuttall said in an interview with Bloomberg Television at Aviation Festival Asia 2025 in Singapore on Tuesday. “We still have an awful lot of legacy debt and we need to find solutions to that before we go out and do big aircraft orders.”

While Sri Lanka’s government has decided not to privatize the carrier, it “knows how important the airline is to the economy,” he said. “The government is going through an IMF process and is not hugely wealthy.”

Sri Lanka’s president Anura Kumara Dissanayake said during his 2025 budget speech to parliament Monday that the government proposed to allocate 20 billion rupees ($68 million) toward repaying the national carrier’s loan capital and interest payments.

Any new jets would mostly be used to increase the frequency of flights to existing destinations, Nuttall said. The airline flies mostly to India and South Asia, as well as domestic routes.

Nuttall said that while the airline would look at both Airbus and Boeing Co. when ordering new planes, choosing the US manufacturer would require a “wholesale fleet change” so would have to a longer-term consideration.