(Posted 31st August 2026)
Courtesy of Amb. Dr. Alain St. Ange
Some moments stay with you long after the conference banners come down and the delegates fly home. For anyone who stood on that beach in July 2012, one image refuses to fade: a small, retired aircraft resting on the sand, waves lapping nearby, its fuselage covered in handwritten signatures under the warm Seychelles sky.
They called her Skippy.
She was a Britten-Norman Islander, born in Bembridge on the Isle of Wight, a workhorse built for short hops and hard runways. By 2012 her flying days were behind her. Yet there she sat, dressed in Routes and Routes Africa emblems, the unlikely star of the Networking Evening at the 7th edition of Africa’s biggest air transport forum. Delegates queued to pose beside her. They scribbled messages across her metal skin. They laughed in the fading light. And in that golden moment, few paused to ask the question that makes the memory so remarkable.
How on earth did she get there?
Skippy could not be driven to that beach. She was too wide for the island’s roads, so the organisers did the only thing they could. From her home at the airport, they put her on a barge, floated her across the water, and eased her ashore where no road could reach.
A First for the Indian Ocean
Routes Africa 2012 ran from July 8 to 10 at the Kempinski Resort at Baie Lazare, its terraces looking out over the same water that had carried Skippy to her beach. It was the 7th edition of the forum, and the first ever held in the Indian Ocean region.
For years Routes Africa had moved across the continent — Casablanca, Cairo, Dakar, Marrakech, the Ezulwini Valley, Bamako. Now, for the first time, it had crossed the water to a scattering of islands in the Indian Ocean. Nearly 300 delegates came from airlines, tourism boards, and aviation associations across Africa, the Middle East, and beyond. It became the most subscribed Routes Africa on record. And every one of them arrived, quite literally, by air — proving the very point the gathering existed to make.
There was a happy coincidence in the timing, too. Seychelles International Airport was marking 40 years since its first commercial landing. Four decades earlier, that first aircraft had opened the door to tourism and the wider world. Now the islands were hosting the continent’s aviation family. Seychelles cannot be reached by road or rail. The island nation can only be accessed by water or air.
Amb. Dr. Alain St Ange, then Minister responsible for tourism, captured it at the reception. Aviation routes, he said, are “the arteries that feed the body of our individual and the body of our collective tourism industries — the industry upon which our prosperity depends on today, and upon which our prosperity will continue to depend on for years to come.”
Dr. St Ange saw the gathering as a chance “to see the bigger picture,” to strengthen old bonds and form new ones. On an island, connection keeps everything alive.
At the official opening the day before, Minister Joel Morgan, the Minister responsible for Transport looked ahead. He spoke of airport development that would let Seychelles welcome up to two million passengers a year by 2019. “We have at present more flights than ever before, by more airlines, operating to the Seychelles international airport,” he told the room. Morgan described a willingness to connect through the great hubs of Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Europe rather than clinging only to direct flights.
Which brings us back to Skippy, waiting patiently on the sand.
The barge was a necessity, born of a simple problem: the plane was too wide for Mahé’s narrow roads, so another way was found. You use the sea when the land refuses to cooperate.
David Stroud of Routes Africa spoke of the mission to facilitate “the physical linking of the world.” The infrastructure of connection is built by people willing to solve the problem in front of them. Every route stitched together through a distant hub, every aircraft financed against long odds, carried the same spirit that placed a retired Islander on a beach.
More than a decade has passed, the delegates have long since left, and the world has moved on. But the memory remains of a small island that hosted the continent’s largest aviation forum and made it the most subscribed in its history. It brought together nearly 300 people who came by air to celebrate the miracle of arriving at all. And on the beach, catching the last of the evening light, sat a foreign-built aircraft that made it there only because someone decided the sea would carry what the road could not. The Team at the Seychelles Tourism Board said to conference delegates when quizzed about how the plane managed to be at the ‘Cap Lazare’ entertainment venue – “Where there’s a Minister Alain St.Ange, there’s a way” adding that nothing is ever too difficult or impossible for him.
If you ever want to understand what air connectivity truly means to an island nation, begin with Skippy — the plane that came by boat, covered in the signatures of people who understood, that warm July evening, that for places like Seychelles, it always will be worth the effort.
