The biggest and most prominent of Kenya Airways' domestic competitors is Airkenya Aviation, formed in 1987 by the take-over of Sunbird Aviation by Air Kenya. Today, it carries some 120,000 passengers a year, two-thirds of them scheduled.
Roughly one-third are charter, but "-we don't always know exactly how many the client actually puts on", says managing director John Buckley.
All the scheduled services are to destinations within Kenya, most of them from Nairobi's Wilson general-aviation airfield to the game parks and to coastal towns.
The most important of these scheduled services are those to Mombasa and Malindi, these routes being operated in competition with national carrier Kenya Airways which traditionally dominated services between Nairobi and Mombasa. Its share of a stagnant market has dropped to 80% in recent years, says Buckley. The remaining 20% is now shared between Air Kenya and Eagle Airways.
The work is concentrated into the hours of 06:00-13:00 each day - 60% or more of the traffic is carried in this period. As there is no engineering back up at the game strips, the company rule is "out by dusk". Some of the traffic is one-way: as Capt Denys Gould-Musgrave explains, "-people go up to the Masai Mara by road [6h] and say: 'no way', and buy an air ticket for the return." To serve those routes, Airkenya has one Fokker F27, two Douglas DC-3s, two Shorts 360s, seven de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otters, three Beech Barons and other smaller craft.
The aircraft, which catch the headlines are the DC-3s but, for Buckley, their days are numbered: "Their despatch reliability is starting to drop," he says. The limitation is on engines, and a time between overhauls of 1,200h. "We either have a problem in the first 150h, or no problem until 1,200. The average is 700h," he says. "When we roster, we put the Twin Otter first. When we're short, we put the DC-3 on. For Lamu [on the coast] we try to use the Fokker, as it's quicker."
In other regions, the end of the DC-3 has been hastened by shortages of AvGas as well, but not here, because of the large number of piston-engined light aircraft still in service in the area. If there is a problem with AvGas, it is its cost, some three times that of Jet A1 - important when each aircraft burns around 420l/h.
Replacing the DC-3 is, however, a problem. "People look at you when you ask for performance curves at 5,500ft [1,680m] and 30íC," says Buckley. "One runway we use at Nanyuki, is at 5,800ft, and one hop on the service lasts just two minutes" - no good for DC-3s, as their engines do not have time to cool down. The F27 is not the answer for the primitive, short, high-altitude, dirt strips. To Buckley, the only credible alternatives to the veteran Douglas are the Short 360, the CASA /IPTN CN-235 and the de Havilland Canada Dash-7, and Buckley is inclining to the latter. "If you can put a Twin Otter in, you can put in a Dash-7", he says, adding that he wants to visit Arkia in Israel to see how its Dash-7s perform before making a decision.
Source: Flight International
