South African Airways (SAA) and Sun Express have entered into a “Damp Lease” contract which will enable SAA to operate a program using two planes SunExpress for a period of six months, starting in mid-October 2023.
The first of the 2 planes was received yesterday. Damp Lease is defined as an aircraft leased with a flight crew but no cabin crew. Sun Express is a joint venture between Lufthansa And Turkish Airlines. Sun Express has one of the youngest fleets in Europe and was named Europe’s Best Leisure Airline in 2023 at the World Airline Awards and in 2022 it was named World’s Best Leisure Airline in the same prices.
SAA has entered into an agreement damp lease with Sun Express, the lease covering the provision of the aircraft, the maintenance and flight crewwhile the aircraft will be served by flight attendant And stewards of SAA to maintain SAA customer service standards. For the maintenance of these aircraft, SunExpress hired SAA Technical (SAAT) to carry out all required work, at its expense, on these aircraft whilst they are operated by SAA.
Under the terms of the agreement, two Boeing 737-800s from the Sun Express fleet will operate flights from Johannesburg on behalf of SAA during the airline’s peak demand period. The first aircraft will enter service in mid-October and a second aircraft will be added based on SAA’s capacity demand. “This unique ACMI is a short-term tactical intervention in SAA’s fleet strategy, as we work on the deployment of our four long-term dry-leased A320s” explained John Lamola, Managing Director of SAA. “We are pleased with our relationship with SunExpress and are excited about its potential as we both manage the seasonality of passenger traffic in our respective geographic markets. »
Tebogo Tsimane, Chief Commercial Officer, expressed his appreciation of how SAA’s loyal customer base has adapted to this temporal experimentation of the SAA brand since the airline began using the ACMI fleet acquisition strategy this year .
