Comair (South Africa) (CAW, Johannesburg O.R. Tambo) has had to wet-lease in additional narrowbody capacity to mitigate the impact of a maintenance scheduling backlog at its previous MRO provider SAA Technical.
In April this year, chief executive Erik Venter warned of Comair's impending shift away from the South African Airways subsidiary citing the latter's inability to procure the right spares in time and plan the execution of required maintenance tasks accordingly. A month later, Comair announced it had selected Lufthansa Technik (LHT) to provide its engineering, planning, line maintenance and component support needs, including consumables and expendables supply. The two have since begun the process of establishing their own AMO (Approved Maintenance Organisation) at Johannesburg O.R. Tambo.
Given these maintenance scheduling issues, Venter said in a letter to its clients and stakeholders last week that Comair had had to budget an additional ZAR100 million rand (USD6.85 million) in an effort to alleviate the capacity shortage (and associated delays) while working on long-term solutions.
To that end, Comair has wet-leased in two aircraft, including a Global Aviation Operations A320-200, ZS-GAR (msn 53), which has been operating for Comair since late September on an contract that will run for "as long as needed". In addition, a Star Air (South Africa) B737-300, ZS-VDP (msn 27346), has been running ad-hoc ACMI flights on and off since mid-September. Both aircraft are used to operate flights for Comair's Kulula Air budget brand.
"This [B737-300] is a smaller aircraft than the others in the Comair fleet and Comair has requested permission from British Airways to use it for the British Airways brand as well, so the aircraft can operate on lower-volume flights and routes," Venter said.
The wet-leases are part of Comair's overall strategy of retaining five full-time back-up aircraft to its fleet of 21 scheduled aircraft. Its overall in-house fleet consists of eight B737-400s and eighteen B737-800s of which one B737-400 and eight B737-800s operate as Kulula Air. The firm is also expecting to add its first two B737-8s in February 2019 followed by five leased B737-800s which will arrive between April and September 2019.
"All will be maintained at the new LHT facility. These aircraft also have a less demanding maintenance schedule than the aircraft that they replace: less time on the ground, more time serving our customers," the CEO said.
Comair has also cancelled all non-critical crew duties to ensure maximum crew availability for flight operations, especially where crew duties have been disrupted by delays.
"We have taken the decision to manage the delays and still get our customers to their destinations, rather than to simply cancel our flights, which would improve our on-time statistics but [be] at the expense of our customers," Venter ended.
