State-owned national flag-carrier South African Airways (SAA), which resumed commercial operations in late September last year, is hoping to relaunch two intercontinental routes before the end of this month, respected commercial aviation news website “ch-aviation” has reported. SAA also hoped to expand its domestic network in the near future. The source for the information was a Travel News Weekly webcast interview with SAA interim COO Tebogo Tsimane. 

The intercontinental routes to be activated before the end of this financial year (which terminated on March 31) are to São Paulo Guarulhos International Airport in Brazil and to Perth International Airport in Australia. They will be operated using the carrier’s leased Airbus A330-300 widebody airliner.

The domestic routes it hopes to reinstate in the near future are those that provide connections for the country’s main coastal cities. They include those between Cape Town and Durban, Johannesburg and George, and Johannesburg and Port Elizabeth.

Later during this year, the airline plans to reinstate three further intercontinental routes. These will be to Frankfurt International in Germany, London Heathrow in the UK and Washington (DC) Dulles in the US. The intent is to operate these services with (presumably leased) Airbus A350 aircraft. SAA had previously operated (from October 2019 to August 2020) four leased A350s.

“The routes we’ve picked for this year are the routes that will be easier and quicker for us to start,” he explained. “They do not require the type of investment that will take us long.”

Currently, the carrier has an operational fleet of ten aircraft, eight being single-aisle airliners and two being widebodies. Nine of them are leased. All are Airbus types, namely three A319-100s, five A320-200s, one A330-300 and one A340-300. The A340-300 is the only aircraft actually owned by SAA, and is used as a ‘spare’, to cover for the A330-300 when it is undergoing maintenance or is otherwise unavailable. The four-engined A340 is far too uneconomical to be used regularly. (Before it entered business rescue, in December 2019, SAA had operated a fleet of 44 aircraft.)

Currently, the airline operates two domestic routes and ten regional routes. The domestic routes are Johannesburg-Cape Town and Johannesburg-Durban. The regional routes are between Johannesburg and Accra in Ghana, Blantyre and Lilongwe in Malawi, Harare International and Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, Kinshasa N’Djili in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lusaka in Zambia, Maputo in Mozambique, Mauritius, and Windhoek International in Namibia.

In the recent South African national budget, SAA was allocated a further bailout, of R1-billion, to settle the airline’s outstanding liabilities.