The former Riviera Executive Aviation, which is now managed by Hadid International Services and has been rebranded as Hadid Riviera, opened its FBO this week at Riviera Airport, a private jet airfield on Italy’s northwest coast. “The launch of the new FBO was planned for April last year, but with the international Covid crisis—and we are still in a situation where nobody really knows when this will be substantially over—we just postponed it,” airport chairman Clemens Toussaint told AIN.
The announcement in 2018 of the Hadid deal with Riviera Airport marked the Dubai-based flight support specialist’s first entry into the international FBO space. Hadid also now operates an FBO at Jinnah International Airport in Karachi, Pakistan.
Meanwhile, a runway expansion project at the airport (formerly known as Albenga Airport) is expected to be completed a year from now, in time for the 2022 holiday season, according to Toussaint. A four-week suspension of operations in winter would be required for work to lengthen the runway to 5,900 feet (1,800 meters), but the exact timing of the works would depend on approvals from the Italian authorities.
Toussaint would prefer to operate under a 50-year lease rather than the current 20-year agreement with Italian civil aviation authority ENAC, as this would improve the economics of runway, MRO, and hangar expansion. He said the airport's business model relies on servicing aircraft that use the field as a year-round base.