KQ to fly to Dar only twice a day as Nairobi complies

Dar es Salaam/Nairobi. Amid blames to Fasjet Airline, Kenya Airways (KQ) yesterday announced to reduce flights between Nairobi and Dar es Salaam from five to only two a day.

The KQ announcement means that the company has complied with the Tanzania Civil Aviation Authority’s (TCAA) directive issued on March 17 to the government of Kenya.

According to the statement released by KQ, the company has reduced the number of flights to Dar es Salaam with effect from March 19.

Earlier, KQ was flying five times a day from Nairobi to Dar es Salam, Zanzibar and Kilimanjaro, but with TCAA decision, the airline will now fly only twice a day.

“Kenya Airways wishes to notify its customers that it has reduced its frequencies to Dar es Salaam from 42 to 14 per week and will now only fly twice daily from March 19th, 2015,” reads part of the statement.

The statement added that TCAA has reached the decision following the Bilateral Air Services Agreement (BASA) issue and that it was aware the matter was being negotiated between the two governments.

“We are aware that relevant Kenya government agencies have reached out to their Tanzanian counterparts in a bid to resolve the issue,” reads part of the statement.

The statement further read that KQ was aware that transport was a critical pillar in the integration of the East African Community.

It called for the speedy resolution of the pending issues pertaining to the BASA since it was crucial in fast-tracking regional integration.

Is Fast Jet the main course?

Though there have been speculations in Kenya that TCAA’s decision was in response to denying landing rights to Fastjet— one of the directors who spoke with The Citizen on Saturday yesterday stated clearly that what happened was a matter of principles and regulations.

Fastjet was unable to secure a licence to operate from Nairobi in 2013.

Our sister paper, the Daily Nation, yesterday reported that failure by the Kenyan Civil Aviation Authority to grant landing rights to Fasjet was the main reason behind Tanzania’s move to reduce KQ flights by almost 60 per cent.

But, one of the Fasjet directors who spoke with The Citizen on Saturday yesterday under the conditions of anonymity because he isn’t the official spokesperson dismissed the claims, saying aviation frequencies wasn’t a matter of Fast Jet and KQ, but were subject to agreements between the two countries—Kenya and Tanzania.

“It’s true that we were denied landing rights in Nairobi under very shaky grounds because while Kenya claimed Fastjet was a foreign owned airline, the very same country had granted Air Uganda—which is wholly owned by a foreign investor—to land at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport,” the director said

 He added, “It seemed, we as Tanzania, are being treated as second class member of the EAC by Kenya…If the issue was foreign ownership, why did Kenya grant permission to Air Uganda to land at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport?”

“We were denied that right one year ago…we accepted it and moved on to operate in other countries like Uganda where we have been granted landing rights; therefore blaming Fasjet for issues which are handled between the two countries is baseless,” he told The Citizen on Saturday over the phone.

“What Kenya did against Fasjet was purely a matter of protection aimed at protecting the KQ monopoly…in so doing they(officials from Kenya)interpreted the Basa agreements to suit their needs,” he  further added.

Fastjet, which is backed by Easyjet founder Stelios Haji-Ioannou, was to launch operations in Kenya via buying Fly540 but the deal fell through. The airline’s move to establish its own budget airline in Kenya also hit a snag after the regulator refused to issue the operating licence—in what was interpreted by some aviation experts as measures to protect KQ.

It finally succeeded in establishing its base in Tanzania.

But, for two years now, the airline has been trying to operate flights to Kenya from Tanzania, however, according to a report by the Daily Nation a 2011 Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) requires that only airlines with substantial local ownership can be licensed to operate scheduled services between the two countries.

What, has however, shocked Tanzanian officials is that Air Uganda, which didn’t have local ownership was granted the rights to operate in Kenya.

According to the Daily Nation, Tanzania attempted to circumnavigate the MoU on the basis of ‘principal place of business and effective regulatory control as additional designation criteria for its airlines. On this criterion, Tanzania wanted Kenya to allow Fastjet to operate scheduled services here.

It is said that refusal by the Kenyan ministry of Transport on the basis that the principles of the Bilateral Air Service Agreement (Basa) and MoU must be protected from ‘susceptible to misinterpretation and abuse’ triggered Tanzania to change lights terms for KQ.

This paper couldn’t establish whether the decision by Kenyan authorities to ban Tanzania tourist vehicles from accessing Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, also triggered the latest move.