1Time expand again
1Time will begin DUR-ELS and CPT-PLZ flights (2x a week) as from November. Their website is still showing CPT and DUR - BFN flights, but you cannot book them yet so lets see what happens there.

how regular are all these flights? dur-els and the cpt/dur flights to bfn? also...how many planes do 1time have? surely the airlines must be considering purchasing more planes

DUR - ELS and CPT - PLZ are both 2x a week services, the DUR - BFN and CPT - BFN haven't been officially announced so I don't know their frequency yet. Re: new aircraft, these new flights aren't going to drain the resources that much (as opposed to if they were both 2x daily routes) so I don't think 1T will be acquiring anything new at this stage.

not talking on 1time, airlines in general...surely new craft are needed?

The big problem with South Africa is that i) given the currency situation and ii) relatively low yields of most of the low routes (since there are so many airlines competing) it makes no economic sense to operate the most modern aircraft. Comair did a fesability study into operating B737-800s I believe but couldn't justify the high lease costs and insurance. Local airlines would rather acquire older airfcraft (1Time for instance pick up their MD80s for about R15 million) and fly them until they are max time airframes and send them to scrap. The major problem with these older aircraft is fuel burn - with oil at US$70 per barrel its going to start to hurt. Getting back to 1Time they have added another MD83 (ZS-OPX) to their fleet. The aircraft is owned by SAFAIR and has been flying around in an all-white paintsheme for a while now, 1T were only planning to put her into service in Oct but following the jack accident with DC9 ZS-NRB they have been forced to put -OPX into service a couple of months early. Good to see expansion from the 'LCC that would never last'.

But surely their should be laws in place to keep these junk planes out of the sky? Also as u mentioned, with fuel costs rocketing, surely there must be serious pluses to the more fuel efficient aircraft?