Interview questions by Table.Media
GmbH, Registergericht: Amtsgericht Berlin-Charlottenburg HRB 212399B
Q1. Boeing projects a doubling of the African commercial fleet by 2045, with single-aisle regional aircraft dominating the increase. Does AFRAA view this as a realistic assessment?
AFRAA sees this as a credible and broadly realistic outlook, provided that fleet growth is matched by growth in connectivity, passenger demand and the operating environment. The trajectory is consistent with what our own data is already showing. Boeing’s forecast that single-aisle jets will account for about 75% of the nearly 1,165 new deliveries (870 aircraft) reflects exactly where the underlying demand sits today. Our H2 2026 Routes and Connectivity Report found that domestic routes carried the highest passenger volumes of any segment — 13.4 million passengers across the top 100 routes, against 9.3 million international and 4.1 million intra-African — and that traffic is concentrated on short-to-medium-haul corridors like Cape Town–Johannesburg and Abuja–Lagos, precisely the profile single-aisle aircraft are built for.
The future of African aviation will not necessarily be about putting larger aircraft on every route. It will be about deploying the right aircraft for the right market, at the right frequency, and opening economically viable connections that are currently underserved. Indeed, AFRAA’s report recommends evaluating right-sized aircraft on lower-volume, high-imbalance and underserved intra-African routes. The opportunity is therefore beyond doubling the fleet; it is to double the connectivity that the fleet enables.
Q2. If so, which specific regional connections in Africa do you view as having the greatest potential?
Our report points to a few clear opportunity areas rather than one single corridor:
First, deepening the existing hub-to-hub backbone. Routes like Johannesburg–Harare, Nairobi–Mogadishu, Nairobi–Entebbe, and Tunis–Algiers are already among the strongest intra-African city pairs, and they anchor a network built around four hubs — Johannesburg, Nairobi, Tunis and Cairo. There’s real potential to add frequency and secondary spokes off these hubs rather than starting from scratch.
Second, and more structurally important, are the inter-regional gaps our connectivity analysis surfaced. Northern Africa has strong internal connectivity (74%), but connectivity between Northern and Western Africa sits at only 34%, and Central Africa’s links to every other sub-region are weak — as low as 3% with Southern Africa and 7% with Eastern Africa. Our route-map analysis also showed Chad, Niger and the Central African Republic with minimal to no direct routes crossing them despite their geographic size. These are the underserved city pairs where fifth-freedom liberalization under SAATM could unlock genuinely new single-aisle regional connectivity, rather than just adding capacity to already-served corridors.
Third, we’d flag route pairs with strong but currently imbalanced demand — such as Dar es Salaam–Zanzibar and Nairobi–Zanzibar — as markets where right-sized regional aircraft deployment could better match seasonal leisure demand patterns.
Q3. What are currently the biggest obstacles to an expansion of African aviation?
Our report points to a few consistent structural obstacles:
- Market fragmentation and restricted air service agreements. Intra-African connectivity remains the smallest of the three market segments we tracked, despite Africa’s population and economic growth — a gap that mirrors the continental narrative that intra-African connectivity lags domestic and international demand. This is precisely the fragmentation SAATM was designed to address, and full implementation remains uneven across member states.
- Hub concentration risk. Most regional connectivity currently flows through a small set of gateways — Johannesburg, Nairobi, Tunis and Cairo — rather than a broader web of direct point-to-point routes. That’s a more resilient pattern than a single mega-hub, but it still concentrates risk, and it means large parts of the continent, particularly Central Africa, have minimal direct service.
- Concentration of international connectivity around one corridor. Our data shows international traffic is heavily weighted toward North Africa–France routes (Algiers–Paris and Tunis/Marrakech–Paris feature repeatedly in the top rankings), rather than a diversified set of global partners. That’s a connectivity risk in its own right, separate from intra-African fragmentation.
- Infrastructure and workforce capacity. This aligns with what Boeing’s own release highlights — the need for 75,000 new aviation professionals and $140 billion in MRO and services investment through 2045. Fleet growth without matching investment in local maintenance capacity, technician training and digital infrastructure will constrain how quickly new aircraft can actually be deployed and kept airworthy.
The bigger question AFRAA continues to press on is whether the policy environment: bilateral air service agreements, fifth-freedom rights, and SAATM implementation, opens up quickly enough to let the forecasted capacity translate into the kind of direct, continent-wide connectivity Africa actually needs.
Connectivity is an ecosystem issue. Airlines cannot do it alone. Governments, regulators, airports, tourism authorities, financial institutions and industry stakeholders all have a role to play in making routes commercially viable. For more aircraft to fly in Africa, we must simultaneously make it easier, more cost-effective and more commercially sustainable to operate those aircraft across African borders.