West African airlines take off

This month sees Air Côte d’Ivoire, the Ivorian national carrier jointly owned by the state (58%), private investors (23%), Air France-KLM (11%) and a regional development bank (8%), set its sights on a destination beyond Africa for the first time. It will fly its first Airbus A330-900neo, a wide-bodied aircraft it took delivery of last August, into Paris.

West African nations have tried this before: create a viable national airline with a small domestic market (Nigeria excepted), a larger regional market and an unknown intercontinental market. Historically, the efforts have met with some success but in the end all failed. 

Air Côte d’Ivoire was created in 2012, after its predecessor, Air Ivoire, was put out of its misery the previous year. It had been reeling from one financial crisis to another during the second half of its 51-year existence. Political turmoil between 1999 and 2011 and a brief civil war contributed to the airline folding, but the problems were structural. Its successor so far seems to fare better. 

Starting with the popular Abidjan-Dakar-Abidjan run, Air Côte d’Ivoire has been steadily building up its regional network while also serving five domestic destinations, strategically positioned in all corners of this 322,462km² country (roughly one-quarter of South Africa’s size). Now Air Côte d’Ivoire serves 18 destinations in West and Central Africa. 

One important factor in its steady growth – only temporarily interrupted by the Covid pandemic – is the continued stability in the country since the end of its short but vicious civil war between December 2010 and May 2011, which cost an estimated 3,000 Ivorians their lives. The events have traumatised the people to such an extent that very few are willing to risk their lives for any politician, even if it means allowing 83-year-old Alassane Ouattara to take a controversial but not unprecedented fourth term of office in the October presidential elections. (Côte d’Ivoire’s first president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, ruled uninterrupted for seven terms between 1960 and his death in 1993.)

Up in the air

The absence of excessive political turbulence, and the promotion of Côte d’Ivoire as both a business and a tourist destination have turned the international Félix Houphouët-Boigny Airport at Abidjan into a major regional hub. Having been refurbished at the beginning of this century and soon undergoing further modernisation, the airport received a record 2.5-million passengers in 2024 – four times the number of arrivals in the last crisis year, 2011. 

The airline has seen parallel developments. In 2023 it carried 721,000 passengers and booked a modest profit for the first time in its history; it went one better the next year, carrying 800,000 passengers and more than doubling profits to 1.4-billion CFA francs – still only $2.5m (turnover was $267m) but it is the right trajectory. 

Not everything has gone swimmingly. Having added Joburg and Casablanca to its schedule in 2022 and 2024, travellers were astounded to find both destinations quietly removed from the reservations website. The airline first cited “operational constraints”, but in 2025 such anodyne airline vernacular no longer satisfies customers.

The real reason was overreach and a number of other problems. One was Morocco’s reinstatement of visas for Ivorian travellers and migrants, which caused a major drop in reservations – though this does not explain why Ivorians kept flocking to a direct competitor, Royal Air Maroc, which continues to fill virtually every seat on its nightly flights into Casablanca. Others cited maintenance issues, while still others suggest that the Moroccan flag carrier may well have launched a highly effective price war, which the Ivorians lack the wherewithal to win. 

The Joburg story is equally unsatisfactorily explained, as it is said that the reopening of the Abidjan-Joburg link by SAA led to excess capacity that caused the Ivorians to suspend their flights. The one problem here is that there is no direct flight into Joburg from Abidjan; SAA connects the two cities through Accra, in Ghana. Pricing and occupation rates may well get closer to an explanation.

As of early September, neither destination has been restored to Air Côte d’Ivoire’s reservation roster. 

The financiers

Air Côte d’Ivoire earlier this year took delivery of its A330-900neo, the company’s 13^th aircraft, and a 14^th will be delivered soon. They were co-financed by the West African Development Bank and the Arab Bank for the Economic Development of Africa (Badea).

Badea is the bank where the governor of the Abidjan-based African Development Bank (AfDB), Sidi Ould Tah, used to hold sway. (Would it be fanciful to suggest that the personal rapport between the new AfDB head and the Ivorian head of state may be ever so lightly linked to Badea’s generous assistance to one of the Ivorian government’s pet projects?) 

Air Côte d’Ivoire uses three Airbus A319 and four A320s for the longer regional routes.

South Africa’s Investec bank has played a pivotal role in the financing and refinancing of three of these aircraft. Relations between Investec and the airline are cordial; they go back to 2017 and the bank considers Air Côte d’Ivoire “a key regional carrier”.

Four Bombardier Q400 aircraft are in use for short-haul flights. The arrival of the A330-900neos will bring down the average age of the fleet from about 11 years to just over nine. 

In terms of onboard service the airline enjoys a good reputation, while ground services still struggle with the chaos that always ensues when there are delays and cancellations. However, there is broad consensus that overall performance has improved, especially in terms of punctuality – always a weak point in this part of the world.

The airline has never experienced major accidents, though there have been incidents such as a nosewheel refusing to descend prior to landing (in 2022), loss of cabin pressure and a precautionary return to Abidjan shortly after take-off (both in April 2025). The renewal, for another five years, of the co-operation with Air France Industries and KLM Equipment & Maintenance will certainly help fleet stability, while Air Côte d’Ivoire continues to train its own pilots, ground and cabin crew and maintenance staff. 

Regional players

Nearby, there is another, similar effort towards (re)building a national-regional-intercontinental airline under way: Air Senegal.

This is Senegal’s third attempt in two decades, and once again the carrier finds itself struggling, cancelling one intercontinental route after another, rescheduling flights or even putting passengers on seemingly subpar but available aircraft, such as the B737-300 that did not make the take-off from Dakar’s international Diass airport in May. The plane was carrying Air Senegal passengers en route to Bamako and your humble correspondent had been put on this very plane in the exact same fashion three weeks earlier.

Nevertheless, and in a bid to better manage competition on that busy Abidjan-Dakar route, the two companies have decided to enter into a co-operative partnership. 

One other regional competitor is Asky, operating out of Lomé, Togo. Asky has the added advantage of having the weight of Africa’s giant airline, Ethiopian, behind it. But so far it appears that the regional market is big enough to sustain two, maybe three small-sized airlines striving for mid-size status and international markets.

As for Paris, Air Côte d’Ivoire must count on the competition of one of its shareholders, Air France, and Corsair – both every bit as ruthless and merciless as Royal Air Maroc.

A one-year time frame will probably suffice to determine whether this latest attempt has been yet another case of intercontinental overreach, or whether Air Côte d’Ivoire has managed to succeed where all others have failed. 

Bram Posthumus reports from Abidjan.

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