AIR TRANSPORT AND AIRPORTS
The African single air market advances one bilateral at a time
SAATM remains more declaration than practice, but a handful of states are opening routes to each other and the traffic is responding.
Aerospace Garage desk
The Single African Air Transport Market has been signed by most of the continent and implemented by almost none of it. Protected national carriers, revenue-sharing bilaterals and simple institutional inertia have kept intra-African routes thin and expensive for decades.
What is changing is bilateral rather than continental. Individual state pairs have liberalised traffic rights, and where they have, frequencies and passenger numbers have grown faster than forecast — evidence the suppressed demand was always real.
The carriers positioned for this are those with genuine hub ambitions rather than flag-carrier habits: Ethiopian from Addis, Kenya Airways from Nairobi, ASKY across West Africa. Each is building network density that only works if the traffic rights hold.
Our read: ignore SAATM communiqués and track bilateral announcements. Route additions between individual states are the only reliable signal that liberalisation is actually happening.
Free every Friday
Aerospace Garage Weekly
Market Pulse, the nine regions and a course of the week — one email, free every Friday.
Your email address is used only to send you the free weekly edition and is never sold or shared. You can unsubscribe from any edition.