Despite market uncertainty around the future of SAA, the airline yesterday tried to reassure naysayers, saying its current business plan was to ramp up operations aggressively.
It planned to implement a fleet strategy that would continue to gain momentum of growing its regional-continental services and introduce international-long haul services.
SAA management said it was relentlessly implementing the expansion of the airline to match market dynamics on both the domestic and international scene.
SAA executive chairperson John Lamola said, as the national flag carrier and an entity wholly owned by the people of South Africa, it had a responsibility to secure the sustainability of the airline industry in South Africa as an enabler of economic development and facilitator of affordable air travel to all users of air transportation in the country.
“The addition of extra seat capacity in the market enables the achievement of an equilibrium between supply and demand in the market that affects the pricing of air tickets,” Lamola said in a statement.
The statement comes as the International Air Services Licensing Council last month revoked 20 of the airline's international routes out of 52 international licences and has asked hard questions about the nature of its equity deal with Takatso Consortium.
An insider told Business Report that the airline was stripped of licences and frequency certificates due to a lack of plans by the airline to operate the routes.
SAA’s redistributed licences and frequencies include from Cape Town and Johannesburg to Gaborone, Livingstone, Luanda, Lusaka, Maputo and Victoria Falls.
The council is reportedly still to consider SAA’s international licences and frequencies after dealing with the regional issues.
SAA operates seven Airbus aircraft, but said as the peak holiday season approached it planned to bring into service an additional three A320 aircraft. The first of these was delivered last month with the rest to be delivered every month from then.
SAA also said it had increased the aircraft size on two of its busiest routes, Cape Town and Harare, over the past two weeks. The Harare-Johannesburg route was now serviced by the larger A330 aircraft on three of its seven-day weekly frequencies.
SAA chief commercial officer Tebogo Tsimane said SAA was replacing its A340-300 with a similar capacity aircraft and would exit the A319 fleet next year.
“As we increase fleet size to match the needs of the growing network schedule, we are encouraged that our strategy to cautiously re-enter markets abandoned due to the Covid pandemic has served us very well during the past 12 months, and we will continue to follow that cautious risk-adjusted trajectory,” Tsimane said.
SAA said despite the delays with the implementation of the capital restructuring transaction involving Takatso, it was on course to deliver “commercially sustainable and world-class air passenger and cargo services in South Africa, regionally and soon globally”.
There was a clear demarcation of focus between the SAA management that was driving a plan for competitive airline operations, and the oversight of matters relating to the equity partner, which were being managed by the Department of Public Enterprises.
Last week, the International Air Transport Association said the passenger market in August this year, compared to the comparative period last year, saw African airlines experiencing a 69.5% rise in traffic (measured by Revenue Passenger Kilometres – RPKs – flown), their capacity increasing by 45.3% and their load factors climbing by 10.8 percentage points to 75.9%. – Additional reporting by Banele Ginindza
BUSINESS REPORT