African Airlines Target Safety, Route Development In Five-Year Strategy

The African Airlines Association (AFRAA) has met with the CEOs of its 45 member carriers in Cairo to establish their priorities for African aviation over the coming five years.

“We are now working on the next strategic plan, which will be from 2026-30,” AFRAA Secretary General Abderahmane Berthe told Aviation Week's Window Seat podcast, ahead of the AFRAA annual general assembly in the Egyptian capital on Nov. 17-19.

“We'll start working on it during our annual general assembly. We have a forum with all our member airline CEOs to plan the next steps, priorities and actions for AFRAA,” he said.

Berthe said safety is currently AFRAA’s highest priority, after eight African runway excursions between January and May 2024. He said these incidents were mainly caused by unstabilized approaches, poor weather and cross winds.

AFRAA responded by setting up a safety and operations summit in 2024. This year’s event was held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and it will run again in 2025 in Kigali, Rwanda, with workshops to share best practices. Berthe also sees a need for additional simulator training and runway safety teams across Africa.

Another priority for AFRAA is intra-African connectivity and route development. “We have been talking about it for many years, and still African airlines are not really cooperating very well to improve connectivity,” he said.

To help facilitate network development, AFRAA launched a “route intelligence portal” in 2022. An updated version will be launched during the annual meeting in Cairo.

“The objective of the route intelligence portal is to allow airlines to look at their network, and the potential new routes they can develop, along with the market that is there. Or, in cooperation with other airlines, in interline or codeshare. This, for us, is very important,” he said.