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Tanzania: Press Releases: Precision Air launches Direct Flight to Mwanza |
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Monday, 06 July 2009 |
6 July 2009: Precision Air has launched a direct flight to Mwanza, Tanzania. This brings to 13 the total number of destinations served by Precision Air within East Africa and a total of 381 departures a week from the destinations making the airline to have the widest network in Tanzania. The Mwanza direct route doubles the airline frequencies to Nairobi from Mwanza to eight per week. Previously, the airline – which is 49 percent owned by Kenya Airways – flew four weekly flights to Mwanza via Kilimanjaro.
“The direct flight to Mwanza will ensure that flying time is minimized. It also improves connections in and out of the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) to South Africa, Dubai, London, Entebbe and Doha,” said Alfonse Kioko, Precision Air Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer. He said the airline has invested on this route as a means to improve its product offering and to meet customer needs and demand. “This route is to large extent a business traveler’s traffic especially the mining industry which is growing very fast, fish and other business done in Mwanza,” he added.
Kioko said that most passengers on the route are business travelers between Mwanza and Nairobi while there is another class of travelers who go to JKIA to catch their onwards connections. “Total passengers airlifted through the Precision Air partnership have increased tremendously from 216,990 in 2004 to 538,305 this year,” he said of the airline whose market share in Tanzania is 49% with an annual turnover of KES5bn (USD65m).
Precision Air is the only IATA Operational Safety Audit (IOSA) certified Airline in Tanzania and hence guarantees safety with the largest coverage within Tanzania and beyond and is 100% electronic ticketing compliant. “It has the largest fleet size in Tanzania; hence reliability is assured and our aircraft type offers more comfort to passengers compared to competitors,” said Kioko.
In 2006, Precision Air and ATR signed a KES9.9bn (USD129m) deal to deliver seven brand new aircraft. The first aircraft (PWA) was delivered in March 2008 and the second (PWB) in November of the same year. Under the terms of the deal, ATR is required to deliver two aircraft each for the first two years and three in the final year.
The financing deal of the seven aircraft (two ATR 42-500s and five ATR 72-500s) has attracted two international awards. On April 20, 2009, Airfinance Journal awarded the USD129m structured finance lease “African Deal of the Year 2008” at the 10th Annual Deals of the Year Awards Dinner ceremony, held in New York. The financing of the ATR fleet was already awarded last December, by Jane’s Transport Finance magazine, as the “2008 Aircraft Leasing Deal of the Year in Africa”. Precision Air currently flies to 13 regional destinations and has plans to introduce flights to other international destinations namely Luanda, Lubumbashi, Johannesburg, Harare, Pemba and Nampula – Mozambique, Lilongwe and Hahaya as part of its expansion strategy.
Similarly, in its domestic expansion plans it targets Mbeya, Songea, Dodoma, Pemba, Zanzibar, and Tanga.
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