On IOL this morning:
October 19, 2006
By AUDREY D’ANGELO
Cape Town - Nationwide Airlines expects to carry 9 000 additional American and European passengers a month on its local and regional routes in the coming holiday season as a result of new codeshare arrangements with Air France and US airline Delta.
At present, it runs 60 daily flights carrying 2 100 passengers locally.
It also intended to apply for codeshare air traffic rights for its passengers to be carried by Delta to a number of US destinations, including Cincinnati, Miami, Chicago, Phoenix and Honolulu, financial director Peter Griffiths said yesterday.
And it was negotiating to lease a second Boeing 767-300 Extended Range plane to enable it to increase its frequencies to London (Gatwick) from four a week to daily. Nationwide's London flights all leave from Johannesburg at present, but if it secured the second Boeing 767 in time, Griffiths said it would have one return flight a week from Cape Town during the holiday season.
These planes are in short supply, however, and Nationwide recently failed to secure a second lease.
The matter is urgent because, in addition to a regular seasonal shortage of airline seats on the London route, Nationwide is in danger of losing three of its seven weekly air traffic rights to London if they are still unused by January.
British Airways franchise holder Comair has complained to the South African licensing council that Nationwide has not taken them up.
Griffiths explained that the more easily obtainable Boeing 747 would be too large for its passenger loads, although the airline expected to need them later as its market share grew.
It could not add an Airbus to its fleet because "we are a Boeing airline and have not got the infrastructure for an Airbus".
Nationwide's pilots all fly Boeings and, in addition to that, the airline carries out its own maintenance with staff trained on Boeings.
US airline Delta will start a service between Johannesburg and Atlanta by way of Dakar early in December. Air France flies between Johannesburg and Paris twice a day. Some passengers on Nationwide flights to London already transfer to Delta and Continental Airways flights to the US.
A Nationwide spokesperson said that at present it carried an average of 2 100 passengers a day on its 60 local flights. These included eight return flights a day between Johannesburg and Cape Town, and six return flights between Johannesburg and Durban.
Interesting projections being put forward, just having a code share is no guarantee of getting the business- its all about connectivity and schedule harmonisation and inventory availability among others. To give an example SAA gets more traffic off the one world alliance partners in South Africa than BA/Comair does- this despite the fact that Comair offers FFP benefits and a supposedly better price. On the flip side we provide BA more feed across LHR than we do to our code share partner BMI- for similar reasons.
Think Audrey had better check her facts- 2100 pax across 60 flights- that’s 35 pax a flight!
Bet you ol uncle Vern is currently scouring Eastern Europe looking for that last great bargain 732…… and on the way back buying up a few extra old busses for the ramp from an out of business ground handler in Bucharest because he got a buy one get one free deal…
