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COVID-19: AFRAA Laments Impact Of Tests On Air Travel

- Carriers projected to lose $9bn in 2020
The Secretary-General of African Airlines Association (AFRAA), Abderahmane Berthe, said the group was pushing for free COVID-19 tests for passengers on African airlines within the continent.
The AFRAA scribe, who spoke at the 29th African Aviation Summit – Air Finance Africa 2020, which was monitored online by Woleshadarenews at the weekend and put together by Chairman, African Business Aviation Association (AfBAA), Nick Fadugba, stated that the unharmonised COVID-19 test and its high costs ranging from $50 and $150 depending on countries has grossly affected air travel within the continent.
His words: “We are pushing for free PCR tests for passengers and that will bring back more confidence to passengers. You can see today that if you take one PCR test from one country and you are going to another country, they will ask for another test”.
“For passengers, it is really big issue. We really need to come up solutions for these protocols. Progress is being made because Africa Union Commission has organized some meetings between Transport and Health ministries and they are also working on the trusted travel project launched ten days ago and AFRAA is supporting this project.”
“The objective is to harmoise across the continent and to come up with mutual recognition of protocols on the continent. So far, 47 states have endorsed this project,” he added.

He lamented the liquidity problems faced by the continent’s carriers, just as he urged states and financial institutions to support them at this critical stage occasioned by COVID-19.
He reiterated the precarious situation of airlines which he said had been grounded for five months, disclosing that AFRAA made some assessments, which showed that the region’s airlines are projected to lose $9b in 2020 compared to 1919.
“We have also made some survey on apron with United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNICA) on the indebtedness of our members in 2020 and 2025. We had 60 airlines which responded to us and the indebtedness was quantified at $3.2b for 2020 and 2021.”
“We also are urging governments to support the private airlines because we are seeing that the support for airlines so far is going to state owned airlines. This is very critical because even if we are seeing a re-start, the condition for restart is very difficult because airlines are operating with very low load factors and also, they are reducing the ticket fares to attract passengers.
“Having low load factor and reduced revenue per passengers, it means that the flight is economically not sustainable. We can see up today, we have only 21 per cent of destinations that have re-opened if we compare it to February,” he noted.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, he noted that AFRAA had been very active, stressing that at the beginning in March, they launched an appeal to African governments to support the airlines.
“I think AFRAA was the first organization to issue such appeal to government and organized on April 20 a webinar on recovery plan for our members. We also made an appeal in May to international organizations to put in place a fund for aviation sector,” he added.
AFRAA, he said, participated also at the high level task force set up by the African Union Commission on pandemic, adding that the task force came up with many recommendations specifically on financial support for African airlines.
“We staged a webinar with AFREXIM on June 4 and with IATA relating to financial support for our members. We have taken a lot of initiatives. We have launched a capacity sharing portal for our members to optimise their fleet utilization because a lot of our members have a lot of fleet grounded,” he added.
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