Airline expand foothold after fleet upgrade

MASEMBE TAMBWE

FASTJET says there will be up to 1,000 more seats per day available to its Tanzanian customers thanks to the addition of another Airbus A319 to its current fleet of four aircrafts.

“Fastjet Tanzania’s current fleet of four aircraft are almost fully utilised, and the addition of the fifth responds to our growth strategy and to the need for additional seat capacity on both domestic and international routes,” said Mr John Corse, Fastjet Tanzania’s General Manager.

Mr Corse also noted that the new aircraft would mean that Fastjet Tanzania aircraft fleet was sufficiently large enough to assist in managing any operational challenges should one of its aircraft need to be taken off the schedule for mandatory servicing and maintenance.

He said that the new aircraft would mean that Fastjet Tanzania’s aircraft fleet was sufficiently large enough to maintain the robustness of the Fastjet operation.

The Airbus-manufactured A319 aircraft is a single aisle twin-engine jet that offers superior levels of efficiency and low environmental impact, in addition to the high levels of comfort expected in modern state-of-the-art aircraft.

It is configured to carry 156 passengers which affords an economy of scale to support the low cost model in which Fastjet Tanzania operates.

“Adding another aircraft to our fleet gives us the potential to increase the frequency of many of our existing routes in response to customer demand, and it supports our goal of adding more international routes to our network during 2016,” explained Mr Corse.

Some of the key routes that the new aircraft will service are the recently commenced routes between Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, Kilimanjaro and Nairobi, and Dar es Salaam to Zanzibar, all of which took off for the first time on January 11, 2016. These new flights all marked an important milestone in Fastjet’s international and domestic route expansion.

Fastjet expects to add more flights to its new Kenyan routes as consumer demand increases for its affordable, safe, quick and on-time service, and it has already indicated that it expects to launch flights between Zanzibar and Nairobi as well as between Dar es Salaam and Mombasa later in 2016.

“Affordable air travel is key to Tanzania’s economic growth, particularly as it stimulates the business and tourism sectors,” added Mr Corse.

Fastjet Tanzania first took to the skies in November 2012 and now operates a fleet of five A319aircraft, on a network covering Tanzanian destinations of Dar es Salaam, Mwanza, Mbeya, Kilimanjaro and Zanzibar, keeping to its commitment of making air travel within Tanzania affordable for all.

It has also introduced international routes to Entebbe in Uganda, Nairobi in Kenya, Harare in Zimbabwe, Johannesburg in South Africa, and Lusaka in Zambia in its three years of operation.

“Since commencing flights we have carried over 1,800,000 passengers, with our research showing that more than one third of our passengers were first time flyers able to afford air travel for the first time,” Mr Corse lamented.