Kenya Airways Advocates E-Jet's Route Development Abilities

African carrier Kenya Airways has this week taking delivery of its latest Embraer 190 and has highlighted the important role the Brazilian manufacturer’s E-Jet family of regional aircraft is supporting its network development plans across the Continent. This is the sixth of ten fully-owned E190s that the Kenyan flag carrier expects to receive by the middle of this year and which are to be used on short regional routes within the Africa continent, where the airline is keen to boosting its presence.

The arrival of the aircraft boosts Kenya Airways’ fleet of the type to eleven having supplemented its directly ordered examples with additional aircraft from lessors. It configures the aircraft in a two-class arrangement (12 Business and 84 Economy Class seats) enabling it to offer a standardized service to its customers regardless of whether they are travelling regionally on an E-Jet within Africa or on its larger Boeing single- and twin-asile jets across medium- and long-haul markets.

“Acquisition of the E190 aircraft is a step towards growing the airline network by route and frequency growth, and the E190 is ideal especially for new routes development, while increasing frequencies on existing routes", said Dr Titus Naikuni, Chief Executive Officer, Kenya Airways.

Under its 10-year strategic plan, Kenya Airways targets increasing its fleet to 119 by 2021; while growing the number of destinations it serves from the current total of 50 to over 115. This includes a goal of serving all of the major capitals across the African Continent, an important market for the airline, generating about half of its total revenue.

While many markets have shown declines due to the general slump in the global economy, the emerging African market has maintained resilience and official data from Kenya Airways for 2012 show that its African routes are among those showing the largest growth. The E-Jet family has played a key role in this, according to company sources, allowing it to introduce new routes and right-size capacity in many markets that could not previously be served as efficiently with larger capacity aircraft.

In the table below, using official schedule data, we highlight the destinations currently served by Kenya Airways using its E-Jet equipment. The airline first introduced the type in July 2007 when it acquired the smallest family variant, the 72-seat E170, and it now operates five of the type. It subsequently added the first of its E190s from December 2010. Kenya Airways first utilised its E170 on flights from Nairobi to Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar and its domestic link to Mombasa. The E190s were introduced on flights to Addis Ababa, Antananarivo, Bujumbura, Djibouti, Gaborone, Harare, Kigali, Lilongwe, Lubumbashi, Lusaka, Nampula and Ndola from January 2011.