LAM airline finally gets competition on domestic routes

Mozambique’s loss-making national airline, LAM, short for Linhas Aereas de Mocambique, will soon lose the monopoly it has enjoyed for a long time, after the regulatory authority Mozambique Civil Aviation Authority (MCAA) announced earlier in the week that three new airlines have been licensed and are getting ready for operations.

One of them will be a dedicated helicopter operation, based in Maputo while the other two airlines’ names were given as “Fly Africa” and “MAIS,” the latter standing for Mozambique Air Services.

FlyAfrica.com’s parent company appears to be based in Mauritius with operating companies in several African countries like Zimbabwe and Namibia and with plans to launch for Gabon and Mozambique using Boeing B737 aircraft.

MAIS in turn intends to initially serve Beira, Nampula, Pemba, and Tete out of Maputo, using a number of Airbus A320 for operations which should at a later stage also go regional with such named target destinations like Johannesburg, Lusaka, Lubumbashi, and even Nairobi.

No timeframe was given by MCAA’s CEO Joao de Abreu when either airline will have passed the process to attain an AOC, pre-requisite to commence flight operations, nor was any mention made of the destinations which will be served out of Maputo by the two. He also expressed the authority’s desire to see airlines use smaller aircraft to reach smaller airports in more remote parts of the country, but the proposed fleet composition of the two newly-licensed airlines would suggest that yet more new airlines might be needed to fulfill that particular objective.