AFRICAN AIRLINE WINS BOMBARDIER’S TOP AWARD FOR AIRCRAFT ON TIME DISPATCH
(Posted 16th June 2014)
It was Ethiopian Airlines which came out tops of the Africa and Middle East operators of Bombardiers’s Q400 turboprop aircraft with a dispatch reliability of 99.4 percent, taking the honours for the fourth year running since this aircraft type joined the ET fleet.
Ethiopian presently operates 13 of these aircraft, with several of them already reconfigured into a two class version, offering 7 business class seats and 60 in economy class and uses them mainly on domestic and shorter regional routes, including flights to the East African airports of Entebbe, Kigali, Kilimanjaro, Mombasa and Juba for their off peak connections.
When getting the news did ET’s CEO Tewolde Gebremariam say in a media release: ‘We are pleased to receive the award for the fourth year in a row. I wish to thank our employees and especially those working in our light aircraft and turbo-prop section for this outstanding result. It is the fruit of their continued dedication and hard work. We are committed to providing to our esteemed customers reliable schedule and punctual flights at all times. Our higher dispatch reliability performance is a reflection of this commitment to our customers on the domestic and regional routes’.
Ethiopian was the first African operators to take delivery of a Q400 aircraft and has since been joined in the wider Eastern African region by RwandAir, which also operates one dual class Q400 on its domestic and regional routes.
Ethiopian is also a Bombardier certified maintenance facility and besides maintaining their own fleet at their in-house MRO also services the RwandAir Q400. Congratulations to Ethiopian for bagging this award once again and the astonishing on time dispatch record of over 99 percent on time performance.
In a related development it was also confirmed that Ethiopian Airlines’ four weekly flights between Addis Ababa and Vienna are code shared flights with Austrian Airlines, a fellow Star Alliance member and part of the Lufthansa Group. Ethiopian, through the code share arrangement, can now offer seamless onward connections in particular across Austrian’s extensive Eastern European network while Austrian Airlines in turn is able to offer connections into Africa through ET’s Addis Ababa hub. Watch this space for breaking and regular aviation news from across the Eastern African region.
