During the week, a domestic operator, Dana Air started the implementation of part of the agreement it entered into with a West African airline, Asky, using a B737-700 with the full branding of the latter airline to operate its Abuja-Lagos route. In this interview with aviation journalists, Chief Accountable Officer/Chief Executive Officer for Dana Air, Mr. Obi Mbanuzuo explained what the agreement is all about and the benefits therein. He also talked about other plans that would make the Dana Air the most preferred airline in the country. BIODUN AKOMOLAFE was there.
Excerpt:
What is the detail of your relationship with Asky?
We had announced earlier in February this year that we had signed some partnership agreement with Asky. One question people always ask is when we will expand our fleet. We always work gradually and rationally, putting one foot in front of another. It is not the fastest that wins the race. Dana Air is here to stay. In November this year, we will celebrate 10 years of being in the market place. This partnership with Asky involves so many things. This initial partnership you see today is the aircraft lease part of it. Recently, we have had some constraints; we have two of our aircraft in France. Hopefully one will be back before the end of the month. Part of this is that we are preparing for fleet augmentation which is successfully on track. Asky is providing us Boeing 737-700 aircraft. There will be three aircraft flying at different times, it is a complex wet lease operation. They will provide an aircraft, take it and put another one in the system. There is also another 737-800 that will also be leased out to us. As time goes on, we will help our staff get acquainted and trained with the aircraft type. We will go further to entrench this agreement with the code share. We are discussing many of these agreements even with other airline. If you want to go to Cotonou, we will provide you the same service. We will be a marketing carrier and they are the operating carrier.Tomorrow, we will code share with them on Lagos-Abuja. Dana Air will be a marketing carrier. This gives benefits to Dana Air and Asky as well. Today, you will see Asky aircraft, wet lease to Dana air, operating on behalf of Dana Air. This will be with Dana Air’s standards, catering on board and operating to our schedule. Then we will entrench further the agreements. They also have an aircraft maintenance facility. These are the things we are looking at in future. We are staring from one small point. We all talk about flying our aircraft elsewhere. Maybe in five years time, we will have a partner who will come and help us do the same thing here. We are making sure Nigerians are trained, but we also have to be sure that we bring those things here. Sometimes we can’t do these ourselves. The partnership is multi-faceted and we are starting today.
Do you have any relationship with Ethiopia Airline in this partnership and what are you giving in return?
We have had no discussion with Ethiopian Airline, even in terms of the aircraft. This is strictly between Dana Air and Asky. For now, it is an aircraft lease agreement, so what we are giving in return is the usual economic remuneration at a friendly rate as brothers who are planning further things. It is at a cost. The code share is also between us and Asky.
People think this partnership is such that will make Asky exploit the Nigerian market using fifth freedom. How can you explain this?
Fifth freedom is similar to something like Air Peace going from Accra to Monrovia. Air Peace is Nigerian airline lifting passengers from Ghana to a third country, Liberia. This is fifth freedom. This is not supported by the Nigerian government and has never been in any way, shape or form. Lufthansa flies in from Frankfort to Lagos every day and further from Lagos, they go to Malabo and they are not allowed to carry passengers from Lagos to Malabo. They are not given fifth freedom and as far as I know, Nigerian government has no plans to give fifth freedom to anyone. Dana Air will not allow anyone do that because it is taking the food from our own mouths. This is simply an aircraft agreement. This partnership is a temporal deal; it is not going to be forever. This partnership is for the benefit of the Nigerian market. Fifth freedom has no say here.
What are your plans to ensure that this type of partnership works with domestic airlines and international airlines?
I can tell you that we will probably have code share agreement with other domestic airlines in the near future. There are few international airlines that we are speaking with now. Dana Air’s plan is not necessarily spreading our own operations, we want to reach out. I want people come into our offices and go online and book our tickets to Sokoto. We do not fly to Sokoto currently. We are discussing with a particular airline domestically and in return, they will sell my Owerri tickets. So are on the part and it is something that we have recognized and we are working on it.
Have you looked at the big problem that may arrive technologically with infrastructure in terms of what percentage you will take and what percentage the other airline that is going to do the carriage will take?
Thankfully in the airline industry, these things have already been settled in the past. There is something called an interline service charge, so unless airlines agree not to follow the internationally recognized interline service charge. So, it is a not a big issue. One of the things that slow down things like this in the domestic market has been something like the clearing house, which is always something available for the international carriers run by the International Air Transport Association (IATA). Last two months IATA had a meeting locally, where they are trying to put in a local clearing house. Dana Air has similar agreement with a couple of local carrier. Dana Air and Medview have something similar but that is done on a one-to-one basis. With what IATA is trying to do in the Nigerian market, it will move things further. After we did this with Medview, two other airlines have approached us.
What other things will you be doing with Asky aside from just leasing aircraft?
There are some aircraft on ground undergoing necessary checks. Work is being done on them to ensure they conform to our regulations here in Nigeria. We are working very hard with the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority. We are in progress and I won’t give a date yet. Asky do a lot of C-checks, if they can help us do something here, it will be perfect. We have engineers capable of doing this work themselves, we just don’t have location and place. We have applied to the Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) in the past but allocation of place has been an issue. We are looking at options but sometime in the future, we will have pilots, big enough for the heavy checks. This is just the beginning. In all our plans, we can see where we are headed to. This is just a start.
