Dubai Connection Good News for Burbank Firm

Note: Portions of this column originally appeared online at the Business Journal website. Lost amid all the coverage two weeks ago about the Emirates A380 jet visiting Los Angeles was the why behind the airline’s decision to start service between Dubai and the West Coast. On-board showers and first-class seats converting into beds makes for good copy and even better visuals and was a publicity coup for the air carrier although the price for even an economy seat is out of reach for the average person reading the Los Angeles Times or Daily News coverage or seeing it on the TV news. Absent from the local coverage were people like Craig Hanna who fly to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates on business and look forward to the start of the Los Angeles service in the fall. Right now, when Hanna goes to Dubai in his capacity as chief creative officer with Thinkwell Design & Production in Burbank, he flies to New York and then catches an Emirates flight to the Middle East. From the time he leaves home to when he arrives at his hotel room, about 24 hours elapses. He’s looking forward to shaving time off the trip by flying direct from L.A. For right now, only passengers on the New York flights will fly aboard the A380, the world’s largest passenger jet. The L.A. service starting in October will use the Boeing 777, perhaps not as luxurious as the Airbus jet but still featuring many of the amenities found on the larger plane. Los Angeles is the third city served by Emirates, with San Francisco becoming the fourth in December. Looking at the U.S. cities – and their major industries – the why behind the airline expansion of service becomes clear. New York has finances; Houston has oil; San Francisco has software and IT; and Los Angeles has entertainment. Others who will utilize the services include those providing construction and consulting services as well as U.S. citizens who have relocated to the United Arab Emirates and return regularly to visit family or their home corporate office, Hanna said There is apparently a significant amount of traffic. “It is hard to get a business class seat regardless of when you fly,” said Hanna. Thinkwell designs and installs experienced-based entertainment for theme parks, museums, and resort destinations around the world and the UAE provides plenty of work. The company had a hand in Ski Dubai, an indoor ski facility. Its current projects include the Warner Bros. Entertainment theme park in capital city Abu Dhabi and four others that Hanna cannot discuss because of confidentiality agreements. The Warner Bros. project was one of several that Southern California entertainment conglomerates have in the works. Universal Studios will open a theme park in 2010 with an estimated price tag of $2.2 billion. Paramount Pictures has licensed storylines and characters from its popular feature films to a real estate developer for a theme park to anchor a reported $2.5 billion resort development in Dubai. Another theme park based on the comic book action hero characters of Marvel Entertainment Inc. is scheduled to open in 2012. Elsewhere in the city are plans for a SeaWorld park; the $1 billion Burj Al Arab hotel; and the $5.5 billion Palm Island resort that involves creating three islands shaped like palm trees with luxury hotels and villas, and high-end shopping and entertainment venues. Little wonder that Thinkwell has a lot on its plate in the UAE and has as many as 125 employees working on projects there. Right now there are four full-time employees in its Dubai office with more to arrive in the next year. As the projects reach the construction and installation phases, still more employees will find themselves in the desert country. It all started with the Ski Dubai park mentioned earlier an indoor mountain with five ski runs. Thinkwell designed the Snow Park portion with sled and toboggan runs, a snowman-making area, and The Ice Cave play area. Being part of a completed project of that size confers a certain level of credibility that makes it easier to get more work in the country, said Thinkwell CEO Cliff Warner. “The strength of our relationships with all the major [film] studios seems to be popular with all the developers in the UAE,” Warner said. Coincidentally, the same week the Emirates A380 came to Los Angeles, Thinkwell received word it was an officially sanctioned business in the UAE. This means the company can operate in the media and entertainment free zone, one of a number of zones or clusters of specific industries. Building centers for healthcare, media, biotech, research and development, and hospitality diversifies the economy and shows that the major cities has more to offer than just oil production. The manifestations of that strategy can be immediately seen in the mega-projects that will create enough of a sense of destination and place that it is hoped will make the country a compelling place to visit. “Maybe not so much from [the U.S.] because it is so far, but certainly from India, Africa, Asia and Europe it is a four to six hour hop,” Hanna said. “The prices are reasonable. The Europeans love the weather in the winter months and being able to go someplace warm with all these exotic offerings.” More on the Airbus Tucked into a wall rack aboard the Emirates A380 was a copy of Viva magazine with a promotion to win passes to Ski Dubai. Considering the offerings available from the Emirates ICE (information, communication and entertainment) system, reading a magazine is a low-tech way to spend the 17 hours it takes to fly from the West Coast to Dubai. The ICE system offers 1,100 channels of on-demand video and audio. All seats include laptop power, a USB port, on-board phones for seat-to-seat calling and personal video screens. A curved staircase leads from the lower level economy class to the plane’s upper deck. In this lofty domain business and first class passengers secrete themselves, with access to a lounge and their individual seats with mini-bars and snack baskets. The seats convert into beds with a maximum length of 79 inches. The aircraft came to L.A. following stops in New York and San Francisco, landing to a crowd of several hundred invited guests and VIPs but absent a planned water cannon salute as the LAX fire trucks were pulled away in response to an emergency landing of an American Airlines jet. We learned that the title of “world’s largest passenger plane” doesn’t confer immunity from an outdated air traffic control system. A scheduled landing of 9:15 a.m. became 9:41 a.m. and then 10 a.m. The aircraft finally pulled up outside the Flight Path Museum at 10:03 a.m. While waiting, the crowd consumed coffee and juice; muffins, fruit kabobs and turkey croissant sandwiches while looking over the exhibits in the museum. Then finally the plane landed and what followed were speeches from a member of the governor’s staff (Schwarzenegger stayed in Sacramento to work on a budget); the state’s transportation and housing secretary, who stressed that growth and development at LAX meant growth and development for the entire region; and Gina Marie Lindsey, executive director of Los Angeles World Airports, who said that LAX has been “re-imagined and reconstructed” to accommodate a new era of international travel as represented by the A380. The jets taking off on the runways made more noise than the idling metal behemoth just a few hundred feet behind the podium with the speakers. Staff Reporter Mark Madler can be reached at (818) 316-3126 or by e-mail at [email protected]. At 6′-6″ he would need a bulkhead seat to fly comfortably in an economy seat of the Emirates A380.