Ladies and gentlemen, Brussels Airlines has “left the building”

The last Brussels Airlines flight has left Nairobi amid a tearful goodbye from many former staff and faithful passengers included, who fancied the “Savoir Vivre” in the air.

The last Brussels Airlines flight has left Nairobi amid a tearful goodbye from many former staff and faithful passengers included, who fancied the “Savoir Vivre” in the air. Brussels Airlines will now in a route exchange with Lufthansa serve Accra/Ghana while the German national airline, which previously had their LH flight number attached to the Brussels Airlines flight, is set to return to Nairobi after leaving the route in the late 1990s.

Lufthansa’s inaugural flight to Nairobi is now only a day away and Tobias Ernst, Country Manager for Kenya – he also remains in charge of Ethiopia where he was based until coming to Nairobi to set up the operation – took the opportunity to speak to this correspondent at the recently concluded Magical Kenya Travel Expo in Diani, where the airline had an exhibition stand.

It was soon obvious that the airline was stung by my own article in which both travel agents and potential travelers had voiced their disappointment over reports that the airline had opted to downgrade the service from an Airbus A340 to a leased Private Air Boeing B737-700 and reduce the anticipated four frequencies to only three.

According to Tobias, a fresh look was taken at the route and, while the Boeing B737-700 will make regular appearances in Nairobi, the number of A340 flights was upped to 16 roundtrips between now and early January. Flights LH 590/591 will operate every Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, leaving Frankfurt at 1110 hours in the morning allowing for optimized connectivity with European and intercontinental flights by Lufthansa in to Frankfurt. The return flight will leave Nairobi at 2320 hours and is due to land back in Frankfurt at 0555 hours, again offering immediate onward connections into LH’s German, European, and the global intercontinental network.

Among those A340 services will be the inaugural flight tomorrow, Sunday, October 25, when senior Lufthansa Supervisory Board and Management members will do the honors to represent the company during the Nairobi celebrations.

Additional flights are also on the drawing board over the festive season, again to be operated with the Airbus A340. The Private Air B737-700NG BBJ1 offers passengers a configuration of 20 seats in Business Class and only 66 seats in Economy Class, providing that extra space on the single aisle aircraft to make it more acceptable in the market. It is also understood that the catering on the B737-700NG BBJ1 flights will be enhanced to make sure none of the passengers on board this aircraft type, as long as it is deployed on the Frankfurt to Nairobi route, will feel to have traveled on a “lesser” aircraft.

It was also confirmed by Tobias during the meeting in Diani that only aircraft which were retrofitted with Lufthansa’s new business and economy class seats will be deployed on the route to Nairobi, alleviating fears expressed in the market that the inflight product would be anything less than state-of-the-art. The three-class configuration of the cabin includes, besides the type of Business Class seats used on the airline’s Airbus A380, Lufthansa’s new Premium Economy class with a 2x3x2 layout while Economy will be in the classic 2x4x2 set up.

From the start of the summer schedule next year, according to Tobias, the flights will be increased to five a week, all to be operated then with the Airbus A340. While daily flights remain an objective has no firm timeline been given when that will take place.

Private Air, registered in Switzerland, operates a fleet of presently 8 aircraft and flies scheduled services for Lufthansa, Scandinavian Airlines, and EC Air under ACMI arrangements [ACMI stands for a lease arrangements including the aircraft, crew, maintenance and insurance].

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Avatar of Linda Hohnholz

Linda Hohnholz

Editor in chief for eTurboNews based in the eTN HQ.

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