The decision this week by Kenya Airways (KQ) to suspend services to Kinshasa is likely to plunge air transport in the Democratic Republic of Congo into a crisis, and raises the prospect of increased airfare as travellers scramble for the reduced supply of seats.
One of only two airlines that provide daily flights between the Congolese capital and their hubs in eastern Africa, the KQ departure has taken roughly a third of the eastbound airline seats out of the market.
Particularly impacted will be passengers who depend on transit through Addis Ababa, Entebbe and Nairobi to their final destinations.
An analysis of schedules data shows that only Ethiopian Airlines, Kenya Airways and Uganda Airlines serve Kinshasa with direct flights to their respective hubs.
In all, there are 5,342 seats a week available either direction. Ethiopian, which operates two flights daily between its Addis hub and Kinshasa, accounts for 63 percent of those seats, while KQ, operating a single flight daily to Kinshasa, offers 1,813 seats, or 34 percent, of the eastbound capacity weekly.
The remaining three percent is provided by Uganda Airlines, which operates three flights between Entebbe and Kinshasa, using its 76-seat CRJ-900. However, because of trade-offs between weight and range, the Ugandan carrier offers only 50 seats per flight, totalling 150 seats a week.
Kenya Airways has been operating its Embraer 190, Boeing 737-800 and recently a leased Airbus 330, to guarantee an average of 259 seats daily. Ethiopian has been using a combination of Airbus 350-900, Boeing 787 Dreamliners and Boeing 737-800 or Max 8 to provide an average of 241 seats distributed across two flights daily.
To maintain capacity and price equilibrium in the wake of KQ’s departure from the market, Ethiopian would require to up-gauge all its services to wide-body aircraft, while Uganda Airlines might be required to increase frequency and deploy larger aircraft.
But, even with a wide-body aircraft picking the baton for its night service to Kinshasa, Ethiopian would not soak up all the demand for the 259 seats vacated by KQ. Uganda Airlines also lacks flexibility within its fleet to deploy a larger aircraft consistently. It might also not be able to line up the technical resources required for it to go daily on the route in the short term. This makes an escalation in fares inevitable.
Congolese air passengers have already been contending with reduced connections to East Africa, after the DRC barred RwandAir from its airspace in May 2022.
KQ CEO Allan Kilavuka announced the decision to pull out of the Kinshasa route effective April 30, citing inability to deliver seamless service after the detention of the airline’s staff by the DRC military.