• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

AH Challenge: More "Air Afrique"

H

Hendryk

Taken back control yet?
Published by SLP
Location
France
Air Afrique is a now-defunct commercial airline whose key feature was its Pan-African identity. It was jointly founded in 1961 by 11 newly independent former French colonies, each of which realized that it did not have the capability to operate an international airline on its own, but that a multinational project with like-minded partners was feasible. At its heyday, the company served destinations throughout Africa as well as several cities in Europe and North America. Already suffering from funding and management issues, it was finally driven to bankruptcy by the hit to international travel in the wake of 9/11.

The purpose of this challenge is to imagine other cases of small and/or developing countries pooling their resources to start large-scale commercial projects, not necessarily limited to air transport.

s-l1600.jpg
 
Arthur_Phuxache said:
Seeing as Air France took over most of the routes, I can't see why it couldn't carry on as an AF subsidiary/codeshare.

There was obviously money on those routes, even if Air Afrique weren't making it.
Click to expand...
One thing that makes the Air Afrique endeavour original is that it was launched at a time when flag carriers were all the rage and every country that could remotely afford it had its own national airline, profitability be damned. And yet these countries, mere months into their independence, figured that it was better to build a joint company so as to achieve reasonable economies of scale. I figure there could be other cases of countries either too small or too poor to pull a given commercial project off individually, and who decide to do it together. @varyar's suggestion about the Baltic states could work.
 
Hendryk said:
And yet these countries, mere months into their independence, figured that it was better to build a joint company so as to achieve reasonable economies of scale. I figure there could be other cases of countries either too small or too poor to pull a given commercial project off individually, and who decide to do it together. @varyar's suggestion about the Baltic states could work.
Click to expand...

The Francophone African countries had a specific link to each other in the way Latin American, Asian, or Middle Eastern countries did not.

The biggest joint venture on this scale is SAS, stable, European democratic countries divided only by language.

There's usually a big national flag carrier (Varig, Garuda, Saudia, Air India, Avianca, Air France, BOAC) likely to be eating your lunch while you try and get started, even before you consider political rivalries, and opportunities for corruption, like those that brought down Air Afrique.
 
I can see a private airline that manages to gain dominant share in a set of related small countries, but having a joint flag carrier is a tougher sell to me. It feels like it would run into the dual problems of being A: Totally unprofitable like most airlines, specially nationalized ones are (the hypothetical private one would have at least managed to organically grow instead of being imposed) so it would struggle in any kind of market, and B: Its joint status would make it less "useful" for the national pride/political parts of a flag carrier.
 
I generally think such arrangements would be marginal, for the reasons pointed out above, but I can think of one possibility along the lines of air afrique.
It would require a radically different situation post-independence, but maybe the former colonies of French Indochina could share an airline?
 
GBW said:
The former Soviet Central Asian nations forming a singular airline instead of a slew of national ones, perhaps? Could end up connecting across the region, Russia, Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia, and eventually farther afield.
Click to expand...

Can't really see Saparmurat Niyazov, Nazarbayev, and Akayev going along with this one.
 
Arthur_Phuxache said:
I think they did IOTL.
Click to expand...
Which, in turn, was ultimately a Chinese airline whose former callsign spawned a subsidiary of China Airlines (which, despite its name, is a Taiwanese company) due to, umm, delicate matters.

As for the OP with more Air Afrique-like services - I can't help but thinking that similar efforts could have probably been tried in the Caribbean. LIAT was a special case as it was a private company, and BWIA was for all intents and purposes a British-Trinidadian airline, but if those two had more buy-in from other BWI colonies, something could have been done to make it work. Furthermore, what would have been an interesting curveball here is if there was also buy-in from Puerto Rico (instead of the much-maligned Prinair) and the USVI (which had long been covered by LIAT) for at least one of those airlines, that could give more of a regional identity that is not narrowly focused on a relationship with Britain but on the commonalities shared among the various countries and territories.
 
GBW said:
The former Soviet Central Asian nations forming a singular airline instead of a slew of national ones, perhaps?
Click to expand...
Given how the "Babyflots" developed with tons and tons of airlines emerging from Aeroflot's 1991 assets, it's about as likely as Sealion working.

(Airlines are actually very easy to start if you have access to existing aircraft. Guess what there were plenty of in January 1992...)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top