Following on from South African Airways (SAA) recent announcement regarding its intention to restart operations by the end of this month, the flag carrier of South Africa has now officially taken delivery of its first two recertified aircraft. The two Airbus aircraft are registered ZS-SZI and ZS-SZJ are both six years old respectively and are on lease from Irish-based aircraft lessor, Goshawk.
The two Airbus A320-200s, which were previously operated by the carrier, were undergoing maintenance at Etihad Airways’ facility in Abu Dhabi prior to South African Airways being put into a “business rescue” status in September 2020.
In June 2021, a 51 per cent stake in the airline was sold to the Takatso Consortium and since then the new owners of the South African airline have been working hard to restore flights to the airline’s network which has not been operational for almost a year now or at since September 2020.
The two Airbus A320-200’s were ferried from Etihad’s maintenance facility in Abu Dhabi to SAA’s base at O.R. Tambo International Airport (JNB) in Johannesburg via Dar Es Salaam Airport (DAR) in Tanzania on the 12th of August 2021.
Despite these two Airbus A320s returning to its fleet, it represents just a small fraction of the airline’s pre-Covid narrowbody fleet. In fact, at one stage South African Airways had a narrowbody fleet consisting of 19 Airbus A320 aircraft as well as a number of Airbus A319s.
According to South African Airways interim Chief Executive, Thomas Kgokolo, the return of these two Airbus A320s is “another noteworthy milestone towards full operational readiness.” Kgokolo also added that seeing the two SAA aircraft landing and taxiing at Johannesburg’s O.R. Tambo International Airport (JNB) is a tangible manifestation of the hard work SAA’s staff have been doing in preparations for its commercial operations restart.
Even though the two aircraft have arrived back in Johannesburg, the two aircraft are not quite ready to re-enter service just yet. They still require some mandatory SAA equipment to be re-installed by South African Airways’ engineering division in Johannesburg. The aircraft will then be used to retrain various groups of the airline’s staff ahead of the carrier’s relaunch at the end of August.
In a company statement, Mr Kgokolo also stated that South African Airways will start with cargo operations at the end of August 2021 and is actively planning the resumption of passenger flights on trunk routes shortly, however, the interim CEO did not specify an exact date or timeline for the resumption of passenger flight operations.
The post South African Airways takes delivery of A320s ahead of launch date appeared first on AeroNewsX.
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