EAS plans freighters into Harare and Lusaka

ALAN PEAT
ONE OF the main plans of the moment at Express Air Services (EAS) is to expand its regional campaign, where it currently routes through six main centres in Africa, according to GM international, John Murray. It’s the hub-and-spoke system, he told FTW, with onward delivery routes radiating out of each of the six main distribution points. EAS operates a combination of three functions, acting as a cargo handling company and also as a general sales agent (GSA) or general sales and service agent handling the marketing of cargoes for airlines – and currently operating with Comair, Rwandair Express, Air Zambia and Pelican Air Services to Vilanculos, Mozambique. To support these functions from its central hub in SA, EAS has divided Africa into regions, feeding cargo in-and-out of the six main centres, and the other surrounding markets which each regional hub serves. Pleasance Airport in Mauritius serves as the regional hub for the Indian Ocean Island (IOI) area; Windhoek for feeding all the smaller centres in Namibia, mostly by road; Lusaka into Zambia and the surrounds; and Harare for the Zimbabwe region and also for Malawi. The more northerly section of the sub-Saharan region is served through Burundi and Rwanda, with the same flight transiting Bujumbura airport in Burundi on to Kigali in Rwanda – with onward-bound cargoes fed from these two stations into Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya. It’s currently a developing market for a whole cross-section of cargo types, Murray told FTW. And he sees a distinct gap in this market area, with a serious shortage of aircraft capacity on three of the major routes in the region, and EAS is planning to fill the niche. “We are in the planning process for operating Boeing 727 freighters into Lusaka and Harare – with the possibility of also extending this operation into Mauritius."