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TAAG Angola Airways has began working flights between Luanda, Angola’s capital and Madrid, Spain’s capital. The Angolan flag provider’s first flight to Madrid – which lasted for six hours 51 minutes – took off on June 27. TAAG will proceed to serve that route twice per week.
That is the primary new European route the airline has undertaken since 2011 and is reasonably uncommon, because it primarily focuses on Portuguese-speaking long-haul locations; Angola’s official language is Portuguese.
The one different European vacation spot TAAG flies to is Lisbon, Portugal, with flights that function as much as twice each day throughout the summer time. The airline additionally used to fly to Porto, one other main metropolis in Portugal, between 2011 and 2020. Outdoors Africa, the airline additionally serves São Paulo, Brazil and Havana, Cuba.
Inside the continent, it operates flights to South Africa, Nigeria, Namibia, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and São Tomé and Principe. The airline at the moment doesn’t serve any North or East African routes.
TAAG’s present flight schedule will see the airline fly to Madrid on Sundays and Thursdays and again from Europe on Mondays and Fridays. The airline will make use of its 4 lively 293-seat Boeing B777 plane.
Prior to now, the one airline that served the Madrid-Luanda route was Iberia, Spain’s flag provider. Nonetheless, they stopped serving the route in 2016, leaving it unattended to for over 6 years.
Iberia has determined to faucet into the route alternative once more, however this time, through a codeshare and interline settlement with TAAG to serve the Luanda-Madrid-Luanda gateway route. The settlement – which was introduced in Could – will permit travellers from TAAG’s Africa-based community to attach through Madrid to Iberia’s community in Europe and the Americas, reaching greater than 100 locations throughout 43 nations. It can even be helpful for Iberia as it can permit their passengers hook up with TAAG’s community in Africa.
In line with Easy Flying, reserving information reveals that about 10,000 roundtrip passengers flew the Luanda-Madrid route in 2019. This interprets to simply 14 passengers each day every means (PDEW) – a worth that’s reasonably low for a long-haul flight.
Nonetheless, relative to the native demand, Madrid was a alternative vacation spot for Angola that yr. Amongst its unserved markets, solely London Heathrow had extra passengers than Madrid. Moreso, the code share settlement will considerably increase visitors in that route.
The hope is that the route will open the door to stronger commerce relationships between Spain and Angola. The latter boasts of a inhabitants of over 30 million, and is wealthy in mineral assets resembling oil and diamonds.
In 2021, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez stated the nation would, by way of investments by Spanish corporations, assist to diversify the Angolan financial system away from oil. The Southern African nation holds a strategic significance to Spain. Angola is known as as precedence nation in Spain’s Focus Africa 2023 plan, because of its political weight, financial potential and regional objectives.
Sources: Easy Flying, Aerotime Hub
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