Yesterday’s second day of the Routes Africa Strategy Forum attempted to highlight some of the key issues that are impacting the commercial aviation business across the entire African region. With a high profile list of speakers the content was specially developed to provide a unique insight into the business with informed moderators ensuring the key issues were not glossed over.
The HUB highlights the key quotes from yesterday's discussions:
“There has been a consistent improvement in safety in Africa over the last 10 years, in fact. The number of actual accidents between 2010 and 2011 dropped by 10 aircraft from 18 to 2010 to eight last year.”
Raphael Kuuchi, director commercial/corporate affairs & industry affairs, AFRAA.
“There are four major countries that have contributed the most to airplane accidents in Africa in the last 10 years, permit me to name them, the first is the Democratic Republic of Congo which in the past 10 years saw 21 fatal accidents accounting for 29.2% of accidents in Africa.”
Raphael Kuuchi, director commercial/corporate affairs & industry affairs, AFRAA.
“The statistics reveal that most of the accidents is the lack of safety management systems.”
Chamsou Andjorin, Director Aviation Safety Africa and ME, Boeing.
“I think that one of reasons we continue to struggle with safety is we continue to externalise responsibility for safety, safety and security is a matter that has to be internalised.”
Nico Bezuindenhout, CEO of Mango Airlines.
“Whilst we are looking to externalise responsibility we can not properly invest and focus our attention to purely improving things if we are not taking our responsibilities for the problem and shirking away from the investment required and the critical assessment of where we are, in Africa as an industry awe are not as safe as we should be.”
Nico Bezuindenhout, CEO of Mango Airlines.
“We have to correct a perception especially in the Western world, a perception that African skies are unsafe, that African airports are unsafe and African airlines are unsafe and to me especially as a foreigner a lot of Westerners, and Western pilots believe that we have elephants, giraffes, lions walking on the runway, airports not doing their job and yes we have serious challenges on this continent.”
Bert van der Stege, Commercial Director, RwandAir.
“The markets are still protected, the laws may not reflect that, the by laws they are not in the rules but no low cost carrier is allowed into Cairo as it would put too much pressure on EgyptAir, the same with extra capacity from Emirates wanting to fly to Cairo with the A380.”
Joachim von Winning, Chief Commercial Officer, Cairo Airport Company.
“In the case of Europe I could imagine North African carriers are looking at other markets to try to increase their loads.”
Rany Nasser, Route Development Manager, Abu Dhabi Airports Company.
“Tunisia had a very stable tourism market, Egypt had a very stable tourism market, will this new government focus on tourism and go back to driving it to their market, don’t know, this is the question.”
Rany Nasser, Route Development Manager, Abu Dhabi Airports Company.
“Just before 2010 we were analysing some data in regards to markets when the Arab Spring started all this was put on hold, definitely looking forward to seeing the outcome of these changes.”
Turk Al Jawini, Deputy Chief Commercial Officer, Nasair.
“Any dramatic changes in regulation Cairo we have been fighting to win rights to for the last four years without success and with new regime no strategy allowing low cost carriers to fly into Cairo this is something we are going to explore and us an opportunity we are really keen to develop.”
Turk Al Jawini, Deputy Chief Commercial Officer, Nasair.
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