Airlink Eyes Domestic Trunk Route Growth, With Boost From Qatar

JOHANNESBURG—South Africa-based regional airline Airlink plans a greater focus on trunk routes, seeing opportunity for improvement.

“We’re well aware that we could be better on the trunk routes, it’s one of the areas where we need to up our game,” CEO and MD Rodger Foster said here at the Aviation Africa Summit in Johannesburg. “We want to accelerate into that, so we don’t allow our main competitor to get too far ahead.”

Fresh equity is enabling new agility at the carrier. Qatar Airways in August announced it would acquire a 25% stake. It followed two years of working on the deal, Foster noted. He added, “I think it’s a wonderful deal for South Africa that there is an airline of the quality of Qatar willing to make a big investment ... they’re investing real equity, not just into Airlink, but into the industry.”

The carrier has been engaged with multiple airlines since rebranding in 2020, establishing 36 airline partnerships. Calling Qatar’s injection a “boost,” Foster said the investment “will help us accelerate into some of our longer-term growth strategy where, if we had to work without the confines of our existing balance sheet, time would be one of the limitations.” The carrier will work to improve its presence and densify the network system that it has, especially on the trunk markets.

“On the trunk markets we are punching below our weight at the moment,” Foster said. “We miss connections on some of our major carriers, not just Qatar, but the likes of Lufthansa, we don’t put enough capacity onto the trunks to de-feed and then re-feed their services to some of the trunk route destinations. The quicker we can up our game on that, the better off we’re going to be, and that’s one of the privileges of having Qatar come on board with real equity.”

Qatar’s investment in Airlink builds on a codesharing partnership between the two. With its investment, Qatar gains two seats on the Airlink board, of 14 total, Foster said. But outside of its role on the board, Qatar has “nothing to do with the executive leadership of our company,” he said. “Agnostic we remain.”

The South African airline currently operates an in-service fleet of 59 aircraft, according to the Aviation Week Network Fleet Discovery database, including 34 Embraer E-Jets (two E170s, two E175s, 24 E190s and six E195s), as well as 20 ERJs (12 ERJ 135s and eight ERJ 140s). The carrier has been working to simplify and streamline its fleet before considering any larger aircraft type, plans for which could be three to four years out. The airline does not aspire to be long-haul, its CEO reiterated in Johannesburg.

“Our short-term focus will be consolidation and fleet standardization—we have too many E-Jet seating configuration variants, and we need to simplify our business,” Foster said. “The larger-gauge narrowbody exercise will materialize in due course—this is not our foremost priority.”