Avia Airlines founder Gert de Klerk, challenges SAA and BA monopoly.
Andrew Chuter/LONDON
Launching a scheduled airline is not for the faint-hearted. No more so in the South African market, where recent casualties such as Flitestar and USAfrica illustrate the high risks of failure. Undeterred, Gert de Klerk in May challenged a longstanding monopoly held by South African Airways (SAA) and British Airways on services between Johannesburg and London with the start-up of Avia Airlines.
De Klerk, the founder and chairman of Avia, is not faint-hearted, neither does he conform to the slick, but grey-suited, image normally associated with scheduled-airline bosses. Rather, he is from the mould, which produced the likes of Richard Branson and Freddie Laker.
Like Laker, the 51-year-old South African is no novice to the aviation business. Avia Airlines' three-times-a-week service from Johannesburg to London Gatwick, with a Boeing 747SP leased from rival SAA, is just the latest in a string of aviation activities which started in the early 1960s, with de Klerk qualifying as a South African Air Force (SAAF) mechanic.
The engineering side of aviation has remained de Klerk's main interest. Through Wonderair, another of his companies, he took a leading role in the design and conversion of the Douglas DC-3 to turboprop - and the SAAF has been one of the biggest customers for the type.
He still pilots DC-3s belonging to Avia Air Charter, another of his companies, having gained much of his flying experience as a pilot for Air Namibia forerunner South West Airlines on DC-3s and -4s and Fokker F27s. He will he says, be type rated on the 747 "...just to keep my hand in".
Most controversially, de Klerk has recently been accused by a Pretoria paper of continuing involvement in the running of guns into Angola; a charge he is now contesting in the South African courts in a libel action.
He vigorously denies the allegation, saying that, while he did run supplies into Angola during the long and vicious civil war between the Government and the Unita rebels of Joseph Savimibi, it was for the International Red Cross and the United Nations.
Although slow to get his promotion campaign in the UK up and running, he says that the airline has seen 70% load factors in the first few weeks of operation as a result of uptake in South Africa.
"It's a good route, with cheap start-up costs. Everything points in the right direction for a successful operation," he says. With tourism expected to grow at around 12-15% for the next three or four years - having already doubled since the start of the decade with the ending of the apartheid regime - he is confident of remaining a player in the international scheduled market.
"The way the market is going, there is also room for a fourth carrier," he says, confirming that he continues to talk to Branson's Virgin Airways about as-yet-undefined co-operation.
Even with Branson poised to enter the market, with or without an Avia tie-up, and SAA and BA continuing to add services between Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban and London Heathrow, de Klerk is considering the start of a fourth flight a week into Gatwick. That, he says, would be the trigger for the acquisition of a second aircraft and new routes.
While admitting that it is early days to start talking about expansion, he has his eyes on a service from Cape Town to London and is contemplating a flight a week to Amsterdam from Johannesburg and possibly routes to the Portuguese capital, Lisbon, and Milan in Italy.
Avia hopes to carve out a market largely with a fares policy which aims to be around 15% below its rivals. "For too long the route has been a monopoly of BA and SAA, a situation which has inhibited the traveler in his choice of carrier, particularly from a cost point of view," says de Klerk.
While his past is colourful, and occasionally controversial, de Klerk is hoping that a successful Avia will help ensure a future, which includes, building an airport near Pretoria and mining diamonds on a concession he owns, as part of a consortium based in Angola.
Usually, sane men do not attempt to build international airports on their own land with their own money. Nevertheless, De Klerk is doing just that with his Freeway Airport project - called that because it lies within sight of the freeway linking Johannesburg and Pretoria.
The Avia boss is engaged in laying a runway, which will have the capability eventually, to handle aircraft up to the size of a Boeing 747.
So far, he has funded the project, which is adjacent to the 1,000Ha (2,470 acres) farm where he lives, and believes that he can have the runway ready to start receiving aircraft by 1998.
De Klerk's rationale for the project is that, with Johannesburg International starting to bulge at the seams, plus the site's proximity to Pretoria, he will have a virtually ready-made airport available to meet growth demands by the end of the century. He claims, that he has already sent a Franco/US consortium packing after it offered $250 million to acquire the project.
Source: Flight International