Over the past year major global airline brands such as Ethiopian Airlines, Qatar Airways and Turkish Airlines, plus local southern African operators Air Namibia and Proflight Zambia, have already inaugurated flights from Durban, South Africa. These services have delivered important regional, continental and notably key intercontinental connectivity, complementing the existing transit options with Comair (British Airways franchise) and South African Airways via Johannesburg and Emirates Airline via Dubai.
Emirates recently enhanced its presence in Southeast Asia with the launch of a new daily linked service from Dubai to Yangon (RGN) in Myanmar, and onwards to Hanoi (HAN) in Vietnam.
RwandAir, has achieved certification of the IATA Safety Audit for Ground Operations (ISAGO) and following the IATA audit is now a certified ground service provider (GSP) under the ISAGO registry for two years until July 2018.
Ghanaian start-up carrier Goldstar Air is confident that next year will mark the end of many years of planning and will finally see it launch short-and long-haul operations from Kotaka International Airport in Accra.
The Kenyan government has recently launched initiatives including visa free waivers for under-16s, reduction of entry park fees, incentives for charters and a scrapping of a 16% VAT on tourism services – a move that is expected to bring down safari costs.
The East African carrier recently introduced its first widebodied jet, an A330-200, into its fleet and a larger A330-300 is due to arrive to complement this. The aircraft will be used to launch flights into London from January 2017, serving Gatwick Airport in the UK capital.
Equipped with technology from Siemens Postal, Parcel & Airport Logistics (SPPAL), the US pre-clearance terminal at Abu Dhabi International Airport is a major success.
Khalifa Al Zaffin, chairman of Dubai Aviation City Corporation opened the Global Airport Leaders' Forum (GALF) alongside the Airport Show in Dubai, with a call to the aviation industry to be a part of the economic prosperity amid unprecedented growth being witnessed in aviation.
Silver Airways began regularly scheduled commercial air service between its Fort Lauderdale, Florida, home base and Santiago, Cuba, Nov. 4, marking the launch of the airline’s fifth Cuba destination.
Plans for Dubai’s airports to have a throughput of close to 150 million passengers annually by 2025 have been backed with what the emirate’s government describes as an initial $3 billion of funding.
Worldwide air freight traffic in September grew 6.1% year-over-year, the strongest growth rate in 19 months, according to IATA’s September Air Freight Market Analysis
Air Seychelles will begin 2X-weekly Mahé (Seychelles)-Dusseldorf (Germany) and 2X-weekly Mahé-Durban (South Africa) services from March 30, 2017. The carrier will introduce a second Airbus A330, scheduled to be delivered in the last week of March 2017.
Air Seychelles has announced a major fleet and network expansion that will see the airline introduce a second Airbus A330 aircraft, commence non-stop services to Düsseldorf (Germany) and Durban (South Africa), and significantly strengthen its existing regional network in early 2017.
The expanded network, which includes six Chinese cities that have never been served directly by a Malaysian airline, is just the first stage of an ambitious plan to more than triple Malaysia Airlines’ China business, adding more than ten additional cities to its network by the early 2020s.
