Senegal’s airlines battle with lockdown ban on air travel
Launching an airline in Africa is a notorious challenge with national champions dominant and opportunities often crimped by regulations. Now, for plucky entrants, coronavirus has added to the checklist of problems, as a small Senegalese airline can attest.
Transair, an ambitious company founded 10 years ago, has no passengers because of the pandemic — but it still has to fly its planes.
Once a week, one of its aircraft makes a technical sortie out of Dakar’s Blaise Diagne International Airport, even though not one of its passenger seats is filled.
The reason is that the company has to ensure its planes meet standards of airworthiness.
Pilots must carry out at least three takeoffs and three landings every three months, requirements for retaining their commercial flying licences.
Pilot Laurent Klinka said he had mixed feelings as he prepared a 50-seat twin-jet Embraer ERJ 145 for a 30minute trip up Senegal’s coast, reaching the northern town of Saint-Louis before turning round and heading for home.
“It’s a pleasure to get back in an aircraft, even if it’s just for an hour,” said French citizen Klinka. “But everyone is afraid of what could happen with this crisis.” All international flights to and from Senegal have been suspended since March 20, the exceptions being a handful of medical evacuations and repatriation flights, as well as the maintenance flights.
Late on Thursday, the government announced that the suspension of all flights in and out of the country would be extended until June 30.
For Transair, the one-hour validation flights for its four Embraers and two Boeings costs more than €1,000 in fuel alone.
The pandemic has dealt a crippling blow to firms that have staked much on shuttling European vacationers to Senegal’s beaches and forests.
The International Air Transport Association (Iata) estimates that the crisis will inflict a hit of $314b on airlines’ turnover in 2020, equivalent to a drop of 55% over 2019.
The sector is not likely to return to prepandemic levels before 2023, says Iata. Such talk is grim news for Senegal’s three airlines, the biggest of which is the national flag carrier Air Senegal,, founded in 2016, which specialises in scheduled flights between West Africa and Europe.
The smallest is Arc-en-ciel Aviation, which caters to charter flights.
In the middle is Transair, which pitches to both markets — scheduled and charter, with a special eye on tourism.
In normal times, its fleet carries out about 60 flights a week.
Forty of them are on domestic routes, while the remainder are around the West African region, to destinations such as Cape Verde, Gambia, Guinea and Guinea-Bissau.
The company says that last year it flew 90,000 passengers as it carved out new routes, including to Liberia, and recorded a slight deficit on its turnover. However, it declines to give figures. Before [the pandemic], we were expanding, we were even thinking about starting intercontinental flights in a few years,” said Transair boss and founder, Alioune Fall.
“Now everything’s come to a halt. When you have been doing three or four flights a day and then it all suddenly stops, you have no idea what lies ahead.”
Seeking to dampen the effects of the crisis, the government earmarked 77-billion CFA francs in support for the tourism and aviation sector. Of this, 45billion francs is likely to go to Air Senegal. Transair, as a private company, is likely to be offered low-interest loans and a delay in VAT payments.
So far, Fall has retained his 104 employees throughout the lockdown, but admits to wondering whether he will be able to meet the wage bill for May.
There was a “risk of bankruptcy” in the direst scenarios, he said, but insisted that he remained hopeful. “This is why the planes are still flying,” he said. “Activity will pick up, starting within a minimal service.”
Ibra Wane, a Senegalese who is a consultant for Iata and owner of Arc-en-Ciel (Rainbow), warned that “bloody” days lay ahead.
“Budgets for business travel are going to be reduced, and tourism will shrink terribly. If [airline] companies do not scale back their operations and cut costs, they could disappear,” said Wane.