South African Airways has raised the possibility of selling slots at London Heathrow in order to help address the airline’s financial pressures.
SAA is government-owned and has been forced to revise its business strategy after a long-running attempt at privatisation collapsed earlier this year.
The carrier’s chair, Derek Hanekom, told a parliamentary public accounts committee meeting on 22 October that SAA had emerged from business rescue, in September 2021, a “seriously weakened airline”, but there had since been “steady growth”.
He says, however, that the carrier needs a cash injection to expand and develop after the failed privatisation.
SAA has two slots at Heathrow – one leased to British Airways and the other to Qatar Airways – and Hanekom told the committee that, even when SAA was “in its heyday”, only one of its slots was being used.
“This has to be a consideration – and this a discussion we’ll have with the shareholder – the possibility of monetising, of taking one of the slots at least,” he says.
“Even when we were flying when we had many routes, many flights to London, we were only using one of these landing slots. The possible disposal of one of the landing slots would obviously be a useful capital injection in the enterprise.”
Hanekom says the slot lease to Qatar Airways expires at the end of March 2025, and SAA has to decide whether the sale of the slot – which could provide capital for purchasing additional aircraft – would generate greater value than the slot rental.
SAA is flying around 16 aircraft, he states, and aims to have 21 next year. He stresses that the carrier is expanding the fleet according to the network demand, and “not just acquiring aircraft”.
Referring to remarks during the meeting about whether SAA could be brought back to its “former glory”, Hanekom states: “The only way we’d be able to do that is with serious investment in the airline.”
But he adds: “It should be borne in mind that ‘former glory’ was a little bit misleading. You can have a big airline, but when you – year after year – are showing a loss, it becomes an accumulated loss. And who takes on the burden of that loss? The taxpayer.”
