Eswatini will double its air carrier capacity when the new airline, Eswatini Air, takes to the skies.
The new airline has missed its own deadline for commencing service – for which there has been no explanation from the latest incarnation of the Royal Eswatini Airways Corporation (Renac). When Eswatini Air was announced last year, flights were promised to be in the air by the second quarter of 2022. Destinations were to have been Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg in South Africa, and Zimbabwe’s capital Harare.
Eswatini Air received its Iata accreditation in 2021. It will fly out of the underutilised eight-year-old Eswatini airport, the King Mswati III International Airport (KM3) in Sikhupe.
Freight News has not been able to establish the reason for the delay in inaugural flights. A spokesman for Eswatini’s Ministry of Public Works and Transport, which is responsible for Renac as a government-owned company and whose minister appoints the company’s board of directors, has been assured that flight takeoffs are “imminent.” Last year, Renac purchased from the French firm HOP! Two 50-seater E145 aircraft. One has been delivered to KM3 airport, outfitted in the livery of the old Royal Air Swazi jets.
The other is at Johannesburg’s OR Tambo Airport undergoing refurbishments.
Currently, only one air carrier flies in and out of the landlocked country. Eswatini Airlink flies only to Johannesburg, and seems to handle all demand for air cargo and passengers. Airlink CEO and managing director Rodger Foster was quoted in the press in March saying there was a conflict of interest involved in two government-owned air carriers competing with one another. He said the Eswatini market was not big enough to sustain two airlines, but he reiterated Swazi Airlink’s commitment to the Eswatini-Johannesburg route.
However, the new air carrier fulfils the decades-long ambition of Renac to get back into the flying business. Royal Air Swazi suffered from a plethora of economic problems in the 1990s, and ceased flying in April 1999. The government-owned airline struck a deal with SA Airlink to rebrand the operation Swaziland Airlink. Renac itself stayed in business as a charter aircraft broker, bringing VIPs into the kingdom on private jets, as well as a ground handling service and a ticket broker with offices in Manzini and Mbabane. President Dlamini, a licensed pilot himself, was brought on as CEO last year to revive flight services.
Freight companies contacted by Freight News say a new air carrier will not necessarily encourage them to send more air cargo to Johannesburg, which is about three hours by road from Mbabane. (KM3 airport is about 90 minutes from Mbabane.) However, an option to fly cargo directly to Cape Town or Durban may conceivably prove useful under some circumstances.
