Low-cost airline FlySafair has made an application to the Air Services Licensing Council for rights to operate several regional routes, including connections to Zanzibar, Maputo, Lusaka, Livingstone, Gaborone, Victoria Falls, Bulawayo, Nairobi, Luanda, and Seychelles.
Revealing its expansion, the carrier plans to include several new aircraft to its fleet.
Their plans come just as Comair’s recent departure from the market took with it approximately 40% of the domestic seat capacity, erasing a fair amount of seat availability on various regional routes.
This departure has created a supply vacuum in some areas, opening opportunities for other carriers, FlySafair announced.
“The market has lost about 9 000 seats a week,” said Kirby Gordon, Chief Marketing Officer at FlySafair.
“The addition of about eight narrow-body aircraft back into the market will help to plug this gap,” he added.
With this said, FlySafair intends to add four aircraft to its fleet before the end of the year, with a fifth lined up for early 2023.
“The schedule for the aircraft coming next week has already been loaded, and it’ll be deployed onto the domestic network, but we’re waiting on the results of our regional route applications to decide how to utilise the next three aircraft,” commented Gordon.
The carrier has also applied for additional weekly frequencies to Mauritius, a route it already operates twice a week.
Gordon confirmed the airline has made an application to be appointed as a designated carrier for operation to Namibia in order to connect to Windhoek.