Africa Warms Up.

Several recent items of good news from Africa continue the momentum in the airline business on the eastern side of the continent.

Nairobi sees a boost with Qatar Airways A320 services to double daily, giving a choice of afternoon and evening departures to Doha and onwards of course to the rest of the Qatar network. Will Emirates respond by putting in its long mooted third daily by inserting a morning departure? The city also sees SAA moving to an A340 instead of an A320 on some of its 10x weekly services to Johannesburg.

Further south, from 1st May SAA moves to a daily nonstop A340-600 from Johannesburg to New York, omitting the current en route Dakar call.This will make the SAA offering more attractive from all East and Central African points from four hours distant Nairobi southwards and challenge the North American offerings of the European and Gulf carriers. Currently, by virtue of its choice of USA destinations, BA leads the pack with its best ever range of connections over London Heathrow Terminal 5, but to New York itself it's anybody's game with choice of schedule, overall time,the convenience and attractiveness of the connecting terminals,price,and service content and style all in play. Already Johannesburg has the edge over the Gulf carriers to Australasia and South America and clearly SAA seeks to build on this.It needs to do something about its on board service though as this falls well below Gulf standards.

A little further west, as John Williams points out, we see further evidence of SAA's declared policy to focus on growth within the high volume/high yield markets in Africa. The airline last month announced the signing of an MOU with the Central Africa Eco Community for the creation of Air Cemac, a regional carrier which will presumably cover the francophone Central African states including Congo Brazzaville, Central African Republic and Gabon. It looks like the same project as announced earlier by the Star African grouping of SAA, Ethiopian and Egyptair for the 2011 launch of a new West/Central African carrier.

All developments in Africa which see more seats, city pairs, frequencies or improved airport facilities and capacity(Nairobi needs to speed this up)are welcome and exciting. Unfortunately, although the above Star venture in Central Africa nudges things a little further west,it doesn't penetrate West Africa as such. The airline business on "the west coast" remains largely a chaotic shambles, albeit with the occasional patch of optimism. The Virgin Nigeria project looked as if it could ride to the rescue but without the massive funds required to set up a Kenya Airways or Ethiopian lookalike from scratch and with an over cautious approach to the necessary rapid development it did not and Virgin pulled out. Nigeria, with its huge oil revenues, should be a first rate hub. It is not. Accra is well positioned to take advantage of this but doesn't really. Abijan is the furthest point west which could fulfil a real hub role but political turmoil has prevented this. In all three places, the airports although modernised in parts are basically decades old.Nigeria adds to its own problems with visa requirements for passengers making international connections so straight away puts itself out of that business. Asky with its simple figure of eight operation with two aircraft provides some useful local connections via Lome, and intruders from the east, Ethiopian and Kenya Airways provide some very useful and good quality city pair connections within the region.These are a drop in the ocean though. There is huge latent demand for air travel to/from and within West Africa but it lags far behind the eastern side of the continent.