Taking off: New Boeing 737 800s strengthens a promising aviation industry

On August 27, to the delight of onlooking government and aviation officials, RwandAir unveiled the first of two Boeing 737-800s it is due to receive this year.

The new 737-800NB comes equipped with more cabin room, space for 154 passengers, and is fitted with new cove lighting, curving architecture and entertainment units that are all part of Boeing’s new Sky Interior.

The development is a significant milestone for a company, which according to RwandAir CEO John Mirenge, functioned as a “virtual airline” prior to January 2010. “We only carried a national flag. We had no planes, no engineers, and no pilots,” he explained to The Independent during a June interview. “We leased on a weekly basis from whoever had a plane.”

However, with the help of a $60 million loan from PTA-Bank in early August, the bank’s third loan to the company, which now totals $85 million, the national carrier has been able to purchase the two new jets, valued at $40 million, to add to its fleet of two CRJ200 and Dash8-200 planes.

With the delivery of the new planes, the second of which is expected in October, the company hopes to open up new routes and increase the frequency of some of its current destinations. In late August, RwandAir announced it will begin daily flights to Rubavu due to higher demand, and at the unveiling Mirenge confirmed that the company will also begin transporting passengers from Dubai to Brazzaville, Congo, and increase its traffic on the Kigali-Dubai route. “The Boeing 737-800 is going to be deployed to be a solution to capacity constraints we used to face in that route,” said Mirenge.

In order to keep pace with the additional passengers RwandAir is hoping to attract in the coming years, Rwanda is in the midst of developing the new Bugesera International Airport, scheduled to be operational in 2015 or 2016. The exact date, explains Rwanda Development Board (RDB) Chief Operations Officer Clare Akamanzi, is hard to predict at the moment because the procurement process to attract investors is only beginning this month and is expected to last until December.

In December, says Akamanzi, the RDB, ministry of finance and the ministry of infrastructure will decide which investor is best suited to partner with the government through a Public Private Partnership (PPP) to fund its development. “It will take about five years after the investor comes aboard to build, but it depends on the investor,” says Akamanzi.

As of now, says Akamanzi, the required studies and business plan for the project are complete and the design of Bugesera is in its final stages. The new airport, she adds, will have the capacity to handle three million passengers a year by 2025 compared to the 300,000 Kigali International Airport is able to cope with, and the amount of cargo tonnage it will process per year will increase from 7,000 tonnes to 15,500 tonnes by 2025. Finally, with a new 4.2km runway, Bugesera will be equipped to handle bigger planes such as the Airbus A380, and receive approximately eight planes during peak hour.

The development at RwandAir and Bugesera are both part of a larger vision to make Rwanda a hub for East and Central Africa in the region. “I see an operation that serves the entire region. I see Kigali becoming a second hub because we are already connecting passengers from the region transiting in and out,” said Mirenge. “People travelling from East Africa and beyond can travel through Rwanda to go to Dubai, to go wherever they want to go as we open up more destinations.”

Turkish Airlines’ (TKA) plans to begin service to Kigali next April will go along way in making Mirenge’s vision become a reality. Inter-airline agreements, as former RwandAir CEO Manzi Kayihura said in a 2007 interview, “is vital,” to the company, and although RwandAir already has partnerships with Kenya and South African Airways, the partnership with TKA has the potential to dramatically alter Rwanda’s air traffic.

As the eighth largest airline in the world in terms of destinations, TKA, explains CEO Dr. Temel Kotil, will connect Kigali to its hub in Istanbul, Turkey from where the airline flies everywhere, “and I mean everywhere,” he proudly affirms. The company has 74 routes in Europe alone, in addition to flights to the Middle East, Far East, Central Asia and North America.

Kotil, who visited Kigali in late July to brief local officials, including Rwandan President Paul Kagame, of TKA’s intentions, says he was impressed with the country’s ambitions to build up the aviation industry “from [RwandAir] management to the president.” “We’re not building Rwanda ourselves,” he says. “It’s RwandAir that we expect to build it.”

Rwanda’s location itself, adds Kotil, also offers many benefits. “It’s really sitting in the heart of Africa and from there you can reach so many cities in two to three hours,” he explains. “It’s long enough to get the full service, but short enough to enjoy a short flight.”

In mid-August the two airlines signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to cooperate closely on coordinating their schedules, sharing codes and technical support and training. The MoU will provide RwandAir and TKA passengers with the ability to check their bags through from their initial destination to their final destination on any RwandAir or TKA flight, and be provided with additional security in the case that a connecting flight between the two airlines is delayed or cancelled.

The increased air traffic, explains Mirenge, “will open up Rwanda to the rest of the world, and by making Rwanda accessible, inevitably it catalyzes economic development,” he says. “Tourism is growing because there is access...and we have conferences taking place here and people are opening up businesses.”

Last year, says Mirenge, RwandAir had 150,000 passengers, a figure he expects to increase by 30 percent this year. The airline also plans to own 18 aircrafts by 2020.

Source:  http://www.independent.co.ug