Fastjet (Dar es Salaam) General Manager for East Africa, Jimmy Kibati, says the carrier's long delayed Fastjet Kenya (Nairobi Jomo Kenyatta) subsidiary could be up and running by June of this year, all Kenyan certification requirements aside.
“If you were to ask me, I would like to start like yesterday. But you know it’s a very engaging process because if you look at the set up structure, one needs to get the planes; we need to hire the employees, pilots and we need to get some licences checked off. Give or take, if you were to give me an approval today, I will be flying by June,” Kibati told Kenya's Capital FM Business in an interview.
The LCC has struggled to establish a Kenyan operation after initial plans to use the existing Fly540 (FFV, Nairobi Jomo Kenyatta) LCC platform to enter the Kenyan market collapsed following an acrimonious relationship with its founder and managing director, Don Smith.
Though it has since entered into a partnership agreement with an undisclosed Kenyan businessman, the airline was last year dealt a blow when the Kenyan Civil Aviation Authority (KCAA) deferred its Air Service Licence application after local operators voiced their objections.
The LCC is looking to offer flights from Nairobi Jomo Kenyatta to Mombasa, Eldoret, Kisumu, and Wajir domestically and to Entebbe, Kinshasa N'Djili, Harare International, Kilimanjaro, Juba, Lilongwe, Lusaka, and Zanzibar regionally. Such routes, if granted, would would put it into direct competition with Kenya Airways subsidiary Jambojet (JM, Nairobi Jomo Kenyatta) and Fly540 subsidiary, Fly SAX (Nairobi Jomo Kenyatta).
