African airlines are banking on inter airline agreements, expansion of networks, and cargo lines to remain afloat in 2022 even as pandemic restrictions continue to nibble away at their bottom lines.
Kenya Airways (KQ) is banking on its agreement with South African Airways (SAA) to have a better year, as its main competitor, Ethiopian Airline looks at its interline agreement with Airlink (4Z), an airline based in Johannesburg, South Africa, and the revamping of several African airlines as its source of traffic and growth this year.
Uganda’s national carrier the Uganda Airlines, on the other hand, is pegging its growth on route expansion, a process that was thwarted for nearly two years by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Jennifer Bamuturaki, the airline’s interim chief executive officer told The EastAfrican that currently, verification teams are doing feasibility studies on eight potential routes in the Middle East, Europe, Asia, West and East Africa, a process that will conclude this month.
By the end of 2021, the airline had planned to fly to at least 18 routes on its schedule, but is currently behind by seven routes.
“We have gone back to the drawing board because we want to make sure that we are flying routes that are commercially viable.
‘‘Even for those that were planned for earlier, we are going back into feasibility studies because the market landscape and the traffic flows have changed,” Ms Bamuturaki said.
These studies, which will inform the management’s decision on which routes to fly, will identify top markets, traffic destinations, new routes and other market needs.
Currently, the airline flies about nine regional routes out of the 16 that were on the initial regional master plan at its revival two years ago. These are Dar es Salaam, Juba, Kilimanjaro, Mogadishu, Mombasa, Nairobi, Zanzibar, Kinshasa and Johannesburg.
According to Ms Bamuturaki, the airline is looking at linking…