SAA identifies Ghana as potential hum

South African Airways (SAA) has put in place several plans to ensure it becomes more globally competitive – and West Africa features high on its agenda. According to Barry Parsons, executive in the SAA CEO office: strategy, planning and project management, end-ofhemisphere airlines like SAA and Air New Zealand are at a distinct disadvantage. “Midhemisphere capacity growth into Africa is being primarily driven from the EU singlemarket or Gulf nation states, such as Dubai and Qatar,” he said at the Transport Forum in Johannesburg last week. “Midhemisphere airlines, such as Emirates, enjoy advantages of geography as they can operate to any major market non-stop, thanks to the longerrange aircraft that are being developed. In addition they have the capital availability to purchase more aircraft.” SAA, he said, was looking at what has been dubbed the West Africa project. “Extensive analysis has shown this to be the ideal location for an SAA hub, improving our geography as we are climbing the hemisphere. Ghana has been identified as a potential location,” he said. “A critical factor for success is a local partner who will own 51%. We are looking at all the factors at present.” But, said Parsons, if South Africa wanted to become more globally competitive it would have to find a solution for its end-of-hemisphere position sooner rather than later. “SAA is progressively losing scale relative to other major African airlines who all have higher hemisphere positions and are either fully or partly state-owned. This makes SAA less competitive, reduces the need to travel via Johannesburg and provides greater access to competing trade and tourism markets.” Parsons said from 2006- 2011 capacity changes had been seen, with monthly seats declining for SAA by 3% while Egypt Air grew by 81%, Kenya Airways by 39% and Ethiopian Airlines by 58%. “During the same period, Emirates increased its African operational scale by 79% and its South African operational scale by 169%,” he said. According to Parsons, another major challenge for SAA is that insufficient bilateral rights into core markets restrict airline growth. “Some of SAA’s current aeropolitical challenges include Mozambique which will not allow SAA to increase capacity or frequency when we could easily operate triple daily services,” said Parsons. “In the DRC we are restricted to four weekly frequencies when we could easily increase this to six while in Angola we are restricted to seven weekly frequencies when we actually require double daily services.” Parsons said for some reason African states remained reluctant to open skies to South Africa.