South Africa's Comair ready to operate from St Helena's airport with a Boeing 737/800

Tuesday, March 8th 2016 - 07:58 UTC

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South African airline Comair will operate the Boeing 737-800, configured to seat about 120 passengers, on the route from the St Helena Island’s airport to Johannesburg. A British Overseas Territory, St Helena is a remote South Atlantic island, where French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte was once exiled and died after his defeat at Waterloo. Read full article

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deed30
So they are going to reconfigure a 180 seat aircraft into a 120 seat aircraft to fly a once weekly service. I predict this route will last a year and be scrapped as uneconomical.
The best aircraft to fly this route would be the Boeing 757 not a 7378 but the runway was not built long enough to accomodate the 757 from the outset...
Mar 08th, 2016 - 03:12 pm - Link - Report abuse 0
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Islander1
The airlink is going to require a British Govt subsidy - the monthly link to Asc another UK subsidy.
Most Saints don't want to go to S Africa - their family links are mostly in UK. Sadly the extra £100million or whatever was not spent on realigning the runway to make it longer so the A330s of MOD that fly As and Falklands could have then flown say once a week UK-AsC-StH-Falklands and the next week the return route. Then everybody would have been happy - and no subsidy required as MOD already charge civilians full commercial type costs.
Or even a commercial line could then have looked at the whole route instead say once a week - taking all civilians off the raf/mod - then mod could cut their 8 flights a month to say 5 or 6 - and save about £ 1/2million a month.
Mar 08th, 2016 - 08:50 pm - Link - Report abuse 0
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Jo Bloggs
More than a realignment was required and I don't think £100,000,000 would've covered it but even if it did that would've been massive additional cost to the project which already came to a bit less than £200,000,000. It's easy to say just spend it but that's a bit like saying next time you upgrade your Disco make it a Range Rover instead. Sure, in the long run it may have paid off (may have!) but there's only so much money to go round at any one time.
Mar 08th, 2016 - 11:30 pm - Link - Report abuse 0
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