MW Airlines rollout time beyond us—PPPC

The Public Private Partnership Commission (PPPC) says the current process to have Malawian Airlines Limited rollout its services is technical in nature and not within their control.

But Jimmy Lipunga, chief executive officer of PPPC, a government agency that brokered the deal with Ethiopian Airlines (ET), insisted that “we are not watching from a distance” and are pushing them.

“I don’t think we are in a position to nail down to a specific date. No one wants the process to delay unnecessarily, but you can’t prejudice regulatory standards. These are matters that are beyond our control,” he said when asked to explicitly state the timeframe when the airline, the successor of liquidated Air Malawi Limited, will rollout its services.

Lipunga said he could not engage in guesswork, but indicated that the PPPC’s desire is to have the airline, 49 percent owned by ET, before the end of the year.

He said what has consumed more time is the process of securing the mandatory Airline Operating Certificate (AOC) by the Department of Civil Aviation (DCA) and the International Civil Aviation Organisation (Icao).

Normally, the airline operating licence takes a minimum of 90 days to be issued, according to Icao standards.

“However, parallel to the effort of securing the AOC, the International Civil Aviation Organisation has been working with the department of civil aviation to update and improve local regulatory safety standards,” said Lipunga, stressing that DCA embarked on a project to develop new regulations against the backdrop of safety audit carried out by  ICAO.

DCA director Alfred Ntilantila, in an interview last week, could also not say when the airline will start flights indicating that the process is long.

“The timeframe [of the certification] is a bit tricky. The conclusion of the certification depends on how we progress with the process,” he said.

But Lipunga said as a sign of wanting to see the process fast tracked, the Malawi Government recently dispatched a team of officials from DCA to Ethiopia for consultations with the Ethiopian regulators and ET officials aimed at fast-tracking the issuance of the airline operating licence.

“The government has made available the requisite resources for regulatory capacity strengthening that would ensure speedy issuance of AOC,” he said.

Lipunga said Malawian Airlines Limited is not intended to replace other international carriers, but to have an affordable national carrier arguing that other airlines operating in Malawi are ripping off customers.

Meanwhile, most of the management positions have been filled by Ethiopian nationals as per the agreement, but Lipunga said the processing of recruiting Malawian staff has started and will initially target the recently retrenched pilots, cabin crew and engineering staff with the rest of the positions to follow later.