Nigeria’s Air Peace will restart once-monthly flights from Lagos, Nigeria to Antigua and Barbados starting May 24 using a Boeing 777.
Sean Mendis says Air Peace has threatened to sue him for questioning the wisdom of this service. I’ve known Sean for more than 20 years, when we co-moderated the Delta Air Lines forum together on FlyerTalk. He’s former COO of Ghana’s Africa World Airlines and he wrote on LinkedIn,
Once monthly service doesn’t support any sort of tourism or business connectivity, unless the business in question is human trafficking.
The airline argues this service makes sense based on “previous ad-hoc charter flights to Antigua and Barbuda in 2023 and a landmark Lagos-Montego Bay charter flight to Jamaica operated in 2020.” A single ‘landmark’ charter flight six years ago. There were some services beyond this. And it’s just… weird.
There’s not a lot of traffic West Africa and the Caribbean. So daily or even Saturday-only service would bleed horribly. So the one thing that monthly service has going for it is fewer flights means losing less money.
- Monthly service doesn’t work for round trips, most vacations, any sort of business travel, emergencies, or really anything.
- It can work only for passengers leaving or returning on the day it’s scheduled, and flying another carrier in the other direction. (And that means losing any airfare benefit from a roundtrip.)
- A Boeing 777 is a lot of aircraft for this!
Fixed costs also can only be spread across a handful of passengers and flights. Even where most local airport functions are completely outsourced, there is still regulatory work, sales and distribution, handling contracts, airport and government coordination, catering, security, local supervision, baggage and cargo processes, disruption planning, and customer support. Even where each of these gets outsourced they need to be set up and monitored.
Operationally, once-monthly service is a problem. What happens during irregular ops? A single flight diversion or cancellation? It appears that on one flight Air Peace sold Jamaica tickets but changed the flight’s destination to Barbados and left passengers there, refusing refunds to those who did not or could not travel there (only acceding to refunds after pressure from their regulator later it seems).
Nobody does anything like this for a reason. I went looking for any examples of it, and the best I came up with for monthly long haul is St Helena – Ascension, which is a charter paid for by employers on Ascension Island. Booking priority goes to their employees, with remaining seats sold to the public.
Ascension Island is isolated in the South Atlantic Ocean, 960 miles from the coast of Africa and 1,400 miles from South America. It’s part of the British Overseas Territory of Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, and Saint Helena is 800 miles away. It has no native or permanent civilian population. Anyone there is from somewhere else, working on the island (or with someone who is).
Air Peace operates Boeing 737 and 777 aircraft as well as Embraer regional jets, with a total of 29 planes in its fleet. Their Boeing 777 fleet consists of ex-Emirates, Singapore, and Japan Airlines planes. Eight years ago they planned to fly to Houston but that never happened. In 2022 they created an alliance with other airlines in Nigeria in order to try to gain official sanction for collusion and price-fixing.
I’m assuming the lawsuit is about him accusing them of human trafficking, not criticizing their business plan.
@Mantis – there’s no lawsuit. They are just trying to make their usual threats to silence any critics.