Rethinking Africa’s Thin Routes

A full aircraft is one of the most seductive images in aviation. Every seat occupied. A crowded boarding gate. An impressive load factor. Surely the route must be working.

Not necessarily. An airline can fill the wrong aircraft, fly it at the wrong time, offer too little frequency and still destroy value. Conversely, a smaller aircraft flying more often can depart with empty seats and create a considerably stronger business.

The African continent is home to roughly 1.5 billion people, yet its aviation market remains remarkably thin. Many city pairs have no nonstop service. Others are connected only a few times a week. Passengers routinely fly hundreds or thousands of kilometres in the wrong direction simply to reach another African city. And when airlines do enter these markets, routes frequently struggle.

IATA recently put numbers to the fragility. Routes offering fewer than 20,000 annual seats account for about 46 percent of Africa’s route network. Even more striking, 96 percent of African routes discontinued in 2025 came from this low-volume category.

Africa has a thin-route problem. And conclusion becomes much more interesting when placed alongside another set of numbers.

Boeing expects African passenger traffic to grow about 6 percent annually through 2044, with the continent’s commercial fleet more than doubling to roughly 1,680 aircraft. More than 1,200 new aircraft will be required, around 70 percent of them single-aisles.

Airbus is similarly bullish. It expects African traffic to roughly triple over the next two decades, requiring more than 1,500 additional aircraft.

So Africa appears to possess two aviation realities simultaneously. Its individual markets are often thin. Its aggregate market is expected to grow dramatically.

Reconciling those two realities may be one of the defining strategic challenges for African airlines over the next twenty years.

It´s not just simply a question of demand. But what combination of aircraft, frequency, schedule and connectivity could create more of it?

Consider a market requiring roughly 20,000 seats a year. There are several ways an airline could supply them.

It could deploy a relatively small regional aircraft close to daily. It could use a larger narrowbody only a few times a week. Or, theoretically, it could deploy something larger at even lower frequency.

On a spreadsheet, annual capacity might look similar. To a passenger, these are three completely different products. The first provides something approaching useful connectivity. The second requires passengers to plan around the airline. The third barely constitutes a network at all.

This is where African aviation sometimes confuses capacity with connectivity.

An airline can technically serve a destination without offering a product useful enough to meaningfully stimulate travel. If I need to travel for a meeting on Tuesday but the airline flies Wednesday and Saturday, that airline has not captured my demand.

If I need to connect onto an evening long-haul departure but the regional flight arrives after it leaves, the existence of both flights is irrelevant. If I cannot return for three days, a trip that might otherwise have happened may not happen at all.

The passenger disappears from the statistics. Eventually, planners look at historical traffic and conclude that demand is weak. But there is another possibility. Perhaps the product helped keep the demand weak.

Historical traffic data tells us how many people travelled under the existing conditions. Existing fares, frequencies, schedules, connections and visa regimes.

It does not necessarily tell us how many people would travel if those conditions improved. That is why airline network planning cannot simply be an exercise in discovering passengers who already exist.

Airlines can also stimulate demand. Introduce a nonstop service where passengers previously connected, and journey time falls. Add frequency, and passengers gain flexibility. Improve the schedule, and business travel becomes practical. Connect the flight into a hub bank, and one route suddenly provides access to multiple destinations. Lower fares, and people who previously did not travel enter the market.

Embraer’s latest research provides an interesting African example. Its 2026 connectivity study identified 55 intra-African city pairs without nonstop flights despite demand it believes could support direct service. Its conclusion is telling, the problem in many markets is not simply demand, but matching that demand with the appropriate aircraft and frequency.

Some supposedly thin markets may indeed be thin. Others may simply be poorly served.

Frequency is often discussed as though it were merely additional capacity. It is part of the product.

Imagine two airlines serving a market capable of supporting 300 passengers each way per day. One offers a single 300-seat departure. Another divides the capacity between three 100-seat departures: morning, afternoon and evening.

Ignoring differences in cost for a moment, both airlines offer the same number of seats. But commercially they are offering completely different propositions.

The first airline effectively tells passengers: Fly when we fly. The second says: Fly when you need to fly. A business traveller can leave in the morning and return in the evening. A passenger who misses a connection may be recovered later that day rather than spending a night at the hub. Corporate travel departments gain more usable itineraries. Connections multiply and passengers begin developing confidence that the airline will be available when needed. Eventually something important happens. Frequency stops merely accommodating demand. It starts generating it.

That produces a virtuous cycle because stronger traffic justifies more frequency and more frequency makes the market even more useful.

This is why frequency can be so powerful in developing markets. But there is an obvious problem. Someone has to pay for those additional flights.

Airline economics presents planners with a persistent trade-off. Larger aircraft generally provide attractive unit costs because fixed costs are spread across more seats.

Smaller aircraft generally have lower trip costs but higher costs per seat. If your only objective were minimising CASK(cost per available seat kilometre ), bigger could often look better.

But airlines do not sell CASK. They sell itineraries.

Suppose a 180-seat aircraft offers excellent unit economics but the market can only support it three or four times weekly. A 100-seat aircraft might have a higher seat cost but permit daily service. Which is the better aircraft?

The answer depends on far more than fuel burn. What fares can each schedule command? How much demand will frequency stimulate? How many additional connections does daily service create? What percentage of passengers are high-yield business travellers? How much cargo exists? What is the trip cost? What happens to aircraft utilisation? What does the additional frequency contribute elsewhere in the network?

This is right-sizing in its more strategically useful form. It is not simply matching an aircraft to today’s demand. Right-sizing is using the right aircraft to help create tomorrow’s demand.

That matters enormously in Africa because the instinct when a route struggles is often to cut frequency. Seven weekly becomes four. Four becomes three. Eventually the service becomes so inconvenient that demand deteriorates further.

There is another option. Reduce gauge before reducing relevance. A smaller aircraft may allow an airline to preserve frequency without flooding the market with seats. That can protect the very conditions necessary for the market to mature.

The argument becomes even more powerful for a network airline.

Consider a hypothetical Entebbe-Lusaka service. Suppose the local O&D market provides only 50 passengers for a departure. Viewed independently, the route may look weak.

But a hub airline is not necessarily selling only Entebbe-Lusaka. It may also be selling London-Entebbe-Lusaka, Mumbai-Entebbe-Lusaka, Lagos-Entebbe-Lusaka, Nairobi-Entebbe-Lusaka. Now the relevant market is no longer simply the number of people travelling between Uganda and Zambia.

The airline is aggregating multiple thin demand streams onto one aircraft. This is one of the fundamental economic functions of a hub. And frequency creates a network multiplier.

Suppose one Lusaka flight connects conveniently into the airline’s morning bank. Add another appropriately timed frequency and Lusaka can potentially access the afternoon or evening bank too. The value of that second flight therefore isn’t merely another set of Entebbe-Lusaka passengers. It creates additional itinerary combinations throughout the network.

This is why evaluating every feeder route exclusively on its standalone profitability can produce bad strategic decisions. A passenger originating in Lusaka might make the regional sector look mediocre while contributing significant revenue to a long-haul flight to London.

The strategist must therefore ask not only: Did this flight make money? But, What value did this flight contribute to the network? This is an important part of the logic behind successful sixth-freedom hubs.

Ethiopian Airlines did not build Addis Ababa simply by discovering enormous point-to-point demand between Ethiopia and every city it serves. It aggregates traffic. Small markets become larger networks.

It is no accident that aircraft manufacturers increasingly frame their African forecasts around connectivity.

Boeing expects more than 70 percent of Africa’s new aircraft deliveries through 2044 to be single-aisle aircraft, supporting domestic and short-haul international expansion.

Airbus sees a continent whose population could grow by another 690 million people by 2044, helping drive the tripling of air traffic it forecasts.

Embraer is making an even more explicit right-sizing argument. Its 2026 global outlook forecasts demand for 8,500 jets of up to 150 seats over twenty years, arguing that connectivity increasingly requires airlines to match capacity more precisely with demand.

Africa provides an obvious laboratory for that proposition.

Air Peace, for example, recently added the 88-seat E175 alongside its larger E195-E2s and smaller ERJ145s, explicitly positioning the aircraft as a way to increase frequencies and capacity flexibility across Nigeria and West Africa.

But Africa’s solution cannot simply be “buy smaller airplanes.” Because that creates another problem.

A perfectly right-sized aircraft for a route can be completely wrong for an airline. Introduce another fleet type and suddenly the company may need another pilot pool, another maintenance programme, another spare-parts inventory, additional engineering capability and another set of OEM and engine relationships.

The route economics improve but the airline economics deteriorate. This is where fleet planning becomes strategy.

The objective is not to find the perfect aircraft for Johannesburg, Lusaka or Accra individually. It is to construct a fleet architecture that produces the best economics across the entire network.

Sometimes one A320 or 737 will be more sensible than two smaller jets. Sometimes an E-Jet or A220 may allow an airline to maintain frequency that a larger narrowbody cannot economically support. On shorter sectors, a turboprop may be unbeatable. And sometimes the best strategic decision is not to serve the route at all.

There is no universally correct gauge. There is only an economically appropriate one for the network.

This is also why the slogan “frequency is king” requires qualification. More flying means more costs, more crews, more take-offs and landings, more maintenance cycles, airport charges, ground handling. Potentially poorer aircraft utilisation. Smaller aircraft can carry significantly higher unit costs than larger ones. So maximum frequency is not the objective. Economically productive frequency is.

The strategist is trying to identify the point at which the revenue generated through convenience, higher yields, connectivity, stimulation and passenger loyalty exceeds the incremental cost of providing another departure.

That’s a considerably more complicated calculation than load factor. A 95 percent-full aircraft can be destroying value if fares are too low or the aircraft is too expensive for the mission.

A 70 percent-full aircraft can be strategically successful if yields are strong, costs are appropriate and its passengers contribute significant revenue elsewhere in the network.

Load factor tells you how full the airplane is. It does not always tell you whether the strategy is working.

Even the smartest fleet strategy runs into the structural economics of operating in Africa. IATA says taxes and infrastructure charges are around 15 percent higher in Africa than the global average.

Fuel presents another major disadvantage. African carriers have recently faced fuel prices roughly 17 percent above the global average, while fuel can account for as much as 40 percent of airline operating costs.

These costs matter particularly on thin routes. A dense market can spread fixed and semi-fixed costs across large numbers of passengers. A marginal route cannot.

Every unnecessary tax, airport charge or regulatory cost pushes the threshold for viability higher. This means governments have a role in right-sizing too.

An airline can deploy the correct aircraft. It can build the correct schedule. It can price intelligently. But it cannot indefinitely stimulate a market that policy keeps making unnecessarily expensive.

Right-sizing and frequency are commercial levers that the airline can control. Liberalisation through SAATM is the policy lever that makes it all click. Africa needs all of them.

Africa is frequently described as a thin aviation market. Statistically, that is difficult to dispute. Today’s passenger numbers tell us how many Africans are willing and able to fly within the network we currently provide. They do not tell us how many would fly if that network were better. Better connected and more affordable. And operated with aircraft appropriately sized to the market. That is the opportunity

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