City pairs in Africa grossly under-served – Dr. Brock Friesen

Accra, Sept. 27, GNA - Dr Brock Friesen, Co-Chief Executive Officer of Starbow has described the situation of low number of flights within Africa as grossly inadequate.

He said about 74 per cent of routes or city pairs within Africa have not more than one flight per day and about 50 per cent of city pairs were grossly under-served, which was not good for building a business centre.

Dr Friesen made these statements in an interview with the GNA on Monday, after Starbow flew its first revenue flight from Accra to Kumasi.

“I can’t think of anywhere in the world where you have so many large cities with less than or one flight a day. If you look at a city pair like the routes into and out of Accra, which is a major regional centre in West Africa, it’s hard to find many cities that have daily flights” he said.

He noted that with Accra being a prominent business centre where large foreign and local companies wanted to base their offices, high flight fares, low frequency of flights among other did not create a good atmosphere to build a business centre.

Starbow would build a regional jet airline network within a two-and-a-half hour radius of Accra that will serve a significant market with at least two flights a day.

In addition, they would address safety issues head-on by building reliability, using high-quality aircraft and investing heavily in parts and maintenance technicians, which is the largest single cost concern here in Ghana.

They would also train pilots both local and foreign to meet the required European standards. “There are no shortcuts in our pilot recruitment”, he said.

“All these are ingredients that would make a safe, reliable and affordable airline” Dr Friesen stated.

Starbow is operating with two BAe 146-300 aircraft with a capacity of 94 seats including eight business-class seats. Starbow said it intended to make air travel in Ghana reliable and affordable and to give customers choices as to what time to travel.

It has started a four-week competitive promotional offer with one-way flights from Accra to Kumasi, and Accra to Takoradi costing 99 Ghana cedis daily, as well as daily flights from Accra to Tamale at 149 Ghana cedis.

It would also apply industry standards techniques to price seats for those who buy tickets early and have some flexibility in their travel plans and offer discounted promo fares on most flights.

Dr Brock said the airline would increase the number of flights from Accra to Kumasi to three when the market picked up. “The business is all about how clever you are and how much you invest in Information Technology,” he said.

Starbow would begin regional flights to either Abidjan or Monrovia by end of the year, he added.