South London Bon Viveur

It's not just ME3, but the other European legacies that seem to have a much bigger foothold in Africa.

jms_uk

Like a nearly empty jumbo on JNB-GBE route...

The Ginge

I am sure this route used to be operated by a 747 a few years ago so it must have gone downhill quickly to be dropped.

mec72

With the new airport in Vic Falls, it could potentially come back as a London - Vic Falls - Harare - London triangle, in the same way e.g. KLM serves Tanzania (AMS - Kilimanjaro - Dar es Salaam - AMS).

Brisbane Road

Will admit I don't know an awful lot about this part of the world but it always struck me as a bit of an odd destination for BA?

I can't imagine the take up was that great. And I'm not even sure there's a particularly large Angolan population in the UK?

Often1

Shifting economics of the sub-continent means shifting destinations non-stop from the UK. With a single connection, most of these destinations are still reachable, but with lower capacity on the route, one can expect fares to increase significantly.

NeedstoFly

Oil industry workers flying back and forth.

Globaliser

BA's operation there had some significant challenges/oddities (look at the schedules), and I think that the general speculation on FT was that whatever traffic is on the route, it's pretty high yield. But it seems possible that this withdrawal stems from the same root cause as the withdrawal from BGO and SVG, which on a selfish basis I personally miss more.

ajeleonard

Just as the oil price is coming back up.....

Palal

I'm surprised BA is not considering running short-haul flights on BA Comair from SA

Tiger_lily

DrBernardo

Oil & gas traffic mainly, plus a little bit for other Euro and North American business connections that didn't want route thro Lisbon, Brussels, Paris. The decent yields that made BA so keen to come on the route must have declined of late in line with general oil business malaise. The sudden-ness of the decision, however, points to possible additional operational reasons - possibly in connection with the 787 shortages.

I don't think Comair is possible - I have a feeling Angolan air service agreements are all single designation, ie one airline from either side...

NickB

Well, in terms of putting a posiitve gloss, I don't think that you would have anything to envy Alastair Campbell at the height of his spin doctoring days . To borrow your phrase, "another way to look at it" is that if one excepts countries bordering the Mediterranean, BA serves only 7 of the 50 African countries (and that is including Mauritius and the Seychelles in there). And even if you include the Maghreb and Egypt, that only brings us to 10 out of 54.

Admittedly, Lufthansa's coverage in Africa is not stellar either but they have SN Brussels in the Lufthansa Group with extensive coverage of the continent. AF also has a fairly good coverage and the missing bits in Eastern Africa are covered by KL. There is no doubt that BA coverage of Africa is extremely poor and IB does not add much either and certainly does not compare to what is offered by its two competing European airline groups..

More globally, BA's Asian network is also limited, with minimalistic covering of China in particular, and its South American network is quite small too, although this is obviously where IB excels to complement BA so that is fully understandable. All in all, BA is an airline which is very heavily focused on the North Atlantic and IAG as a whole is a group whose intercontinental network is very heavily focused on transatlantic routes and is much weaker with respect to Asia and Africa.

NickB

What do you mean? BA does rely on Comair for connection to some Southern African destinations outside SA itself (eg: WDH, HRE, VFE) although clearly there is only so much backtracking Northwards that you can make before it starts to make no sense at all to go via JNB.

FlyerGill

Avios redemptions have been very open for at least the last 9 months that I've been watching the route.
We had 4 CW seats booked for September and the cabin was almost empty as of last weekend.
An oil worker friend says that it fills up in the few days before the flight though.