Nigeria’s Ibom Air Seeks To Emulate AirBaltic’s All-A220 Business Plan

Nigerian carrier Ibom Air is looking to transition to an all-Airbus A220 fleet to expand its intra-African operations, mirroring the business model of Latvian carrier airBaltic.

Local government-owned Ibom Air operates a fleet of nine aircraft—seven CRJ900s and two Airbus A220-300s—with nine more A220-300s on order.

Ibom Air executive director and COO George Uriesi told Aviation Week that the airline received its first A220 in November 2023, and this was joined by a second of the type in August. Both A220s are equipped with the latest Pratt & Whitney engine iteration, meaning Ibom Air has not been affected by recent engine-related groundings.

“So far, we’ve utilized the airplanes maximally, and they’ve flown flawlessly,” Uriesi said. “As long as the airplane is reliable, then we’ll continue to grow the fleet, just like airBaltic has done, building and buying more and more of them.”

A third A220 is scheduled to arrive in 2025, followed by two in 2026, three in 2027 and three in 2028.

However, to keep pace with demand, Ibom Air took delivery of two additional CRJ900s at the beginning of November, because there were no A220s available, and the team is already familiar with CRJ operations. In the longer term, Uriesi said the CRJs are too small, out of production, and Ibom Air wants a single-type fleet.

“We don’t expect to take any more CRJs,” he said. “At some point in the near future, I don’t know when yet, we’ll start phasing them out and replacing them with A220s.”

The whole fleet is purchased, rather than leased, and operating with an average load factor of nearly 90% across seven destinations: six domestic and one intra-African route to Ghana.

The A220s have sufficient range for Ibom Air to add destinations like Cairo, Cape Town (South Africa) and Casablanca (Morocco). However, unlike other African carriers, Ibom Air has no ambitions of branching out into long-haul flights. “We’re not even going there,” Uriesi said. “We believe that’s where African airlines go to die. Let the Ethiopians and the Egyptians do all of that; we will stay in Africa.”

When asked whether A220 hold capacity could be a limiting factor for longer regional routes, Uriesi said this has not been an issue for domestic flights, but it will need to be monitored on longer regional flights. “Nigerians travel with a lot of bags,” he said. “That’s why we think that we need to watch it carefully and make sure that the airplane is capable.”