__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Friday, June 15, 2012

► KENYA: FastJet shows off livery (Pics); Fly540 brand to go.

FastjetFollowing on from this week's acquisition of Lonrho Aviation (t/a Fly540), FastJet Ghana's parent company Rubicon Investments, of which Stelios Haji-Ioannou of EasyJet fame is a 5% shareholder, has outlined its plans and future prospects for the transformation of and integration of Fly540 into a Pan-African LCC giant.

A Low Cost Carrier headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya, Fly540 has franchises in Angola, Ghana, Tanzania and Ghana, and operates ATR 72s, CRJ-100s, DHC 8-100s and McDonnell Douglas DC 9s. Collectively, its route network includes various cities in Kenya, Tanzania, Angola, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Burundi, Liberia, Nigeria, South Sudan and Uganda.

FastJet Airbus airplane
A FastJet Airbus A319 rendering

Ultimately, FastJet aims to carry more than 12 million passengers a year, by focussing on Africa's burgeoning middle class - a phenomenon that is fast becoming a reality in Angola, Kenya and Nigeria, where substantial economic growth in recent years has meant more money in the pocket for the ordinary man on the street.
""If you take the four countries, they have a total population of 100 million people. If you estimate that all our customers come from just those countries alone, you could see three million of them becoming customers with us, flying a couple of times a year. That would generate something like 12.8 million passengers [annually]." "

At the helm of FastJet will be many of Haji-Ioannou's colleagues from his days at EasyJet: Richard Boden, a former Contracts Manager at EasyJet, Ed Winter, FastJet's new CEO and formerly easyJet's Chief Operating Officer, whilst Haji-Ioannou himself, will be a consultant.