Rodger Foster; Credit Airlink
One of the reasons is Airlink operates a tailor-made network of destinations that see actual demand, rather than an overblown intercontinental system such as SAA did and serves them with smaller aircraft that are easier to fill.
“Our objective is to be sustainably viable,” says CEO, shareholder and co-founder Rodger Foster in an interview with Airlineratings.com in Johannesburg.
Right now he pursues this objective in a new setting. “Of course it is a challenge, after 30 years, to start as a new brand in our own right, as since 1997 we have been identified as SAA because of our franchise partnership,” says the youthful-looking 67-year-old. “This is a new chapter for us and it is exciting because we got our own brand and we now got relationships with all the world’s biggest airlines.”
As a member of IATA and IOSA-safety-audited, Airlink has inked code-share deals with Emirates and United Airlines and in addition, there are interline agreements with 19 global carriers, among them with British Airways, Virgin, Delta Air Lines, Air France/KLM and Lufthansa.
Credit: Duane Moller Instead of joining fare wars, it can’t win on such contested South African domestic routes as Johannesburg to Cape Town with currently seven competing brands, Airlink pursues more lucrative international routes – if it can get the respective traffic rights. This remains a constant problem, highlighting the ongoing fragmentation of African aviation and the lack of opening up of markets. “That’s why Africa only accounts for two per cent of worldwide air traffic, there is only lip service being paid to aviation liberalization in Africa so far,” contends Rodger Foster.
There are several international treaties in place about open skies above Africa and other forms of bilateral liberalization, but in fact, everything is still highly regulated and tied down by bureaucracy.
“There are 200+ airlines in all of Africa, all trying to find an existence with the average population of about a billion people being very poor. How do we justify keeping over 200 airlines going? Every country must have at least one, is the assumption. How bizarre, that has to be rationalized,” demands the South African airline veteran. “For the industry to survive and grow in Africa we got to recognize that there needs to be critical mass for each of those operations, efficiencies of scale, and none of the airlines in Africa at the moment has that. As the only exceptions possibly Ethiopian has got scale, and maybe Airlink is getting towards scale,” observes Foster.
The Airlink boss is a 100 per cent Embraer devotee. He intends to go forward with the existing fleet inventory, comprising of 17 E190s and three E170s alongside the ERJs, and also keep the Brazilians as his exclusive supplier.
“We can imagine flying the Embraer E2 jet family in the long term, but any change of aircraft type needs to have the support of the right balance sheet,” cautions Foster.
Credit: Athol Franz
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