Egypt Air has disclosed plans to fly to the Port Harcourt International Airport, Omagwa.
The airline’s general manager in Nigeria, Mr. Khalid El Rafie, said in an interview that Nigeria was the only country in Africa where Egypt Air stops at three points.
“We have at the moment almost 16 flights; we are operating from Lagos, Kano and Abuja, maybe the next step will be Port Harcourt, but I can’t tell you exactly when.
But we are studying the possibility of operating to another point. In Africa, Nigeria is the only country that we have three points and we have good traffic,” said Rafie.
He disclosed that the airline had been operating in Nigeria since 1962 and that it started with two flights “until we got to where we are today.”
Apart from Nigeria, Rafie said the airline flies to almost about 70 destinations covering almost all the European countries, the far East, Middle East and Africa.
On the effect of the uprising in Egypt on the airline, the general manager admitted that the crisis had a serious effect on the carrier. However, he said the airline had started to recover.
“At the moment it is not the volume of passengers we are looking for, because you know that we were facing some crisis in Egypt during January and February. But we are recovering.
We stopped our flights almost for one week and we resumed after the crisis.
The market is good and we are recovering from our problems now, it is almost safe now in Cairo. Everything is almost clear at the moment,” he stated.
He would, however, not disclose how much the airline lost during the period.
“I don’t have the figures exactly but…the traffic was almost less than 60 per cent of our routes.
The problem was only for two months and by the third month the traffic started picking again,” he said.
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