But if you look at the larger aviation market, African aviation is completely fragmented with hundreds of airlines – small ones, most of them unbuyable, and most of them unfortunately at the risk of collapse. Africa from an aviation standpoint is quite small. You have to think about this in the global context because we’re not an island. And then you have an opportunity to share expertise, between two different organizations, and to build each other up, and also you have checks and balances of maintaining standards and safety because that is key, and critical. Secondly, because you now have a larger asset pool, you can then reduce your maintenance costs, you can reduce your purchase cost of equipment, because of the economies of scale. Not only that, they have different routes to get to those destinations, so they can choose to fly through their hub in Nairobi, they can choose to fly through their hub in Johannesburg. So for example with South African Airways, when it comes to fruition and we get to the point where we want to get to, which is to co-create a large pan-African airline group, you will find that if we have close to 50 destinations that we fly to and they have 50 destinations they fly to, if you merge them together you’ll have close to a hundred destination for our customers. You look at your customers and you see, what kind of solutions can you provide to your customers, by giving them a variety of options, and also by accessing destinations that you’re not able to access if you did it alone. That’s what happens when you consolidate. That way, then you attract a lot more people to the group. But more importantly, you also want to make sure that you are creating a network that gives your customers or passengers many options. You need to create economies of scale, so that your unit costs, drop. And we want to make sure that this space is safe and we have been involved in a lot of safety enforcement when it comes to manned aircrafts and we can translate that to unmanned aircrafts.īecause aviation is a very expensive venture, with very low margins. Because there can be a lot of rogue operators – that’s one of the things that people need to be aware of. Of course many people are doing this, but the difference that we bring to the table is our experience and our ability to monitor safety. So that’s the kind of thing that we want to roll out, helping those kinds of initiatives, so have discussions for example with the forestry department or can we help do the census for afforestation in Kenya? Talk to state co-operations that have a lot of utilities-Kengen, Kenya Power and Lighting, Kenya Railways, Kenya pipeline-to help them do their inspections and surveillance on their installations, instead of using very expensive helicopters. Just to give you a typical example, so we were partly involved in the wildlife census that took place, that KWS (Kenya Wildlife Service) was doing a few months ago, and we were given a section of it. In the past, when you see a problem, people used to send helicopters – in fact they still do even now.
Right now we’re in discussions with some organizations to see how we can help farmers to do that.Īs an example, we can provide local solutions to the locust menace. For example, there’s a lot of need for aerial inspection, surveillance. We want to provide efficient and cheaper solutions to some of the problems that we see in the country. We used that manned aircraft experience and translated it into an unmanned aircraft experience. We are one of the most experienced aviators in this country and in this continent. We have become a more agile organization, over the last one and a half years, and so, we have to be at the front and center of every new emerging technology and we want to be in the conversation of how we introduce that UAS technology in this country. This is why we set up Fahari and we have a lot of experience in aviation. So we are not too far from pilotless aircrafts. The aircraft can virtually take off, fly and land on autopilot. Right now technology is so good that pilots, when they use autopilot, can just sit and watch and make sure that their aircraft is going in the right direction. Because very soon we’ll have pilotless aircrafts flying, just as there are driverless cars. First what’s a cutting-edge technology in aviation? It will have to be UAS technology – that would have to be what it is.
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