A South African aviation consultancy backed by former senior executives of South African Airways (SAA) and SA Express are planning to launch a domestic airline in the country. Blue Crane Aviation is currently in the early stages of the project, under the working title Fly Blue Crane, but an application for an Air Services Licence has been handed to the Ministry of Transport.
Blue Crane Aviation was established as an independent aviation service provider to the travel sector based in Johannesburg, South Africa with the objective of assisting airlines (and travel companies) with strategic, administrative, sales and operational requirements. It is headed by former SAA chief executive officer, Siza Mzimela and includes Theunis Potgieter and Jerome Simelane among its management team.
Fly Blu Crane is one of a number of start-ups planning to launch domestic flights in South Africa. FlySafair received its licence recently, while fastjet continues to explore plans to launch in the country following the success of its international flights between Dar es Salaam and Johannesburg. Another start-up, Skywise, established by the founders of defunct carrier 1time also secured a domestic licence but this was revoked recently by the Department of Transport after it failed to make any progress with the project in the 12 months since it was awarded.
It is very early days for the Fly Blue Crane project and details of its planned operations are vague, although unlike most other start-ups the suggestion is it will avoid ‘The Golden Triangle’ domestic network linking Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg and will instead focus on serving regional markets both with point-to-point flights and direct links to the major cities.
Our analysis of schedule data for 2013 shows the three major cities account for 79.1 per cent of the domestic seat capacity from South Africa with 36.2 per cent of annual departures from Johannesburg, 26.6 per cent from Cape Town and 16.3 per cent from Durban. With new arrivals and airline failures the South African domestic market and seen ups and downs over the past ten years. Capacity peaked in 2011 at just over 18.1 million seats but has subsequently declined in each of the subsequent years.
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