Cape Town - It looks as though we shall see 1Time back in the air before long. Efforts to stop London-registered Fastjet from buying it out of provisional liquidation and using it as part of a pan-African route network, on the grounds that South African airlines must be 75 percent owned by South Africans, seem to have failed. The latest news is that Fastjet, whose main shareholder is Lonrho, is in the course of obtaining South African partners.
Ed Winter, chief executive of Fastjet, has been in South Africa this week for discussions with the provisional liquidator, Aviwe Nyamara, and if he is satisfied the next step will be for him to call a meeting of creditors to discuss payment of part of 1Time’s debts.
That agreement is unlikely to fail since this is, apparently, the only way the creditors are likely to get any money owing to them. So expect to have very reasonably priced Fastjet services between this country and other parts of Africa within a few months.
This need not be a disaster for either SAA or Comair, since business travellers normally prefer to fly with a full service airline rather than a low cost particularly on a fairly long flight, and it may save SAA from having to provide a loss-making service on some African routes for political reasons. Comair, incidentally, has cut out some unprofitable routes such as to Dar-es-Salaam already.
While in South Africa, Winter is negotiating with our aviation authorities for Fly540 – part of the Fastjet group – to provide a service between Dar-es-Salaam and Johannesburg in competition with SAA.
It seems unlikely that Fastjet, which clearly wants to build a network serving several countries, will want to invade South Africa’s domestic routes to any great extent, at least not at first.
It will, of course, provide tough new competition for SAA’s low-cost division, Mango, and Comair’s low-cost division, kulula, but hopefully growth in the domestic market and in tourism from overseas will bring more passengers into the market.
Meanwhile, Mango and Kulula are expanding their route networks.
Competition on local routes will, in any case, be tough in the last half of the year and should bring fare prices down.
The original founders of 1Time, Glenn Orsmond and Rodney James, with the addition of Johan Borstlap, former chief executive of the original Sun Air – which was a really excellent airline that forced both SAA and Comair to improve standards of comfort and service – have obtained a licence to start a new airline, Skywise, and plan to launch it on the Golden Triangle between Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban, later in the year.
They are experienced airline people and it was under James’s management that 1Time secured a 15 percent share of the domestic market so they may start with a loyal customer base. - Weekend Argus