SAA halves UK flights

LONG-HAUL INEFFICIENCIES: 12-HOUR TURNAROUND TIME CUTS PROFIT Trips on regional and domestic routes also reduced.

Struggling South African Airways (SAA) will drop one of its two daily return flights to London’s Heathrow Airport from April 20, as part of its ongoing “network remediation”.

CEO Vuyani Jarana stated: “We have decided to focus on those areas of our business that will enhance our efficiencies, bring more value to our customers and produce improved overall performance of the airline. Network optimisation is one such area that can contribute towards containing our costs.”

The difficulty for SAA on all its long-haul routes is that aircraft sit idle for 12 hours (or longer) on the other side of the world (many global airlines flying to Johannesburg or Cape Town have the same problem here).

An airline like Emirates, for example, generally turns around aircraft in less than three hours on both ends. SAA’s lengthy turnaround time, to some extent forced by the overnight nature of the flights, means four aircraft are idle for about half the time they operate on this route. Add inefficiencies from a cabin crew and pilot scheduling point of view, and this route isn’t as lucrative as it seems.

Competitors on the direct route, British Airways (BA) and Virgin Atlantic, will continue to mop up the demand from (especially) corporate travellers. BA operates Airbus A380-800s on both daily flights to Joburg and Virgin Atlantic flies the new Boeing 787-9 (Dreamliner). Both planes are much more efficient than the Airbus A330-200 and the ageing Airbus A340-300 that SAA flies to London. SAA will introduce its new Airbus A330-300 on the route from March 25. This will address the fuel-efficiency problem and help fix passenger comfort and quality issues. SAA took delivery of five A330-300s last year.

It can seat 249 passengers, but on the two current daily flights, SAA offers 444 to 475 seats, depending on the aircraft. This nearly halves capacity on this route. By contrast, Virgin Atlantic offers 264 seats per day, while BA has 938 seats (469 in each A380).

As such, from April SAA will operate only 17% of the direct capacity on this route, from about 28% currently.

Of course, hub carriers in the Middle East and increasingly Africa have all but obliterated leisure demand on the pricier direct routes. Emirates, Qatar Airways, Etihad Airways, Turkish Airlines, Ethiopian Airlines and Kenya Airways all offer popular, cheap onestop routes to London.

SAA has been forced into making this decision because of unavoidable decreases in the size of its fleet. In September, it was forced to cut its fleet of (then) 62 aircraft by as much as 10.

This drastic cutback on the London route follows a number of cuts to its regional network in 2017, decreases in frequencies on secondary domestic routes and the steep cuts to the Joburg-Durban and Joburg-Cape Town effected last month.

Its statement on the London changes hints at more to come in its international network.

Hilton Tarrant works at immedia.

Network optimisation helps contain costs