Cemair wins market share as aviation industry reshuffles

The South African airline landscape has been changing faster in recent months than Casanova used to change lovers, and Cemair founder and chief executive Miles van der Molen has seen it all.

Cemair has never been at risk of the long kiss goodnight. Through resilience, hard work and hanging tough, Van der Molen’s airline has grown to settle into the country’s third largest operation.

Van der Molen said that the recent changes in aviation have been huge. He said: “There has obviously been some enormous downsizing and companies like Mango, SA Express and Comair leaving the market.”

He added that this opened substantial space in the market for Cemair.

Van der Molen added: “Unfortunately, the South African aviation industry has a history of destroying value and all those players were in distress before the pandemic nightmare hit us. Their position was weakened by it.“

While Cemair is planning to carve out more of the domestic and regional market for itself, Van der Molen is also cognisant of recent failures and was surprised that privately owned airlines have demanded government support as they faltered. Comair recently asked for a bailout.

He said: “We’ve seen airlines appeal to government for support, claiming that they have strategic value to the economy or support economic growth in other ways and that should be recognised. I disagree with that. The purpose of a business is to create economic value primarily. Obviously, there are other reasons for its existence and that needs to be focused on. Airline management need to make sure they operate their companies profitably and not just make aeroplanes fly around the sky. And the South African airline industry needs to return to baseline.”

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In the past two decades, jilted mistresses of the sky included Nationwide, 1Time, Mango, SA Express, Velvet Sky, Skywise and more recently Comair. State-owned SAA returned from business rescue and is presently attempting to claw back market share and public confidence.

Cemair has seen its ups and downs too. Two years ago, the airline was grounded by civil aviation, and it was a ten-month long dogfight to get flying again.

He said: “We had a ten-month illegal grounding that was overturned by the Appeal Committee, and we received the go ahead to resume operations just five months before the COVID storm broke. And we have seen about two years of that.

“So, it was a difficult patch, but we just kept our line and kept on pushing. And the world has changed a lot around us, and we are very optimistic about the phase that lies ahead.”

And the airline is on a growth curve, now. Said van der Molen: “We have grown consistently since the introduction of our service in 2006. We have been in different markets and grown consistently until 2019. Then, we plateaued and searched for opportunities as we saw the industry change around us during the pandemic, and we began planning the next phase and that was going to be based on growth.”

To that end, Van der Molen has up gauged his fleet to larger aircraft, and plans are afoot to grow capacity even further.

He noted: “Presently we are increasing our fleet, particularly with larger regional class aircraft. We are focusing on a 78 to 90 seating range. We expect to take a couple of more aircraft units on this year and then we are expecting to get it into traditional narrowbody equipment next year, which is the Boeing 737 or Airbus A320 market.”

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Cemair has also embarked on a people-growth trail. Over the past year, the company has added almost two hundred new staffers to its books. Yet he added that aviation can sometimes be a very closed community, making it tough for new entrants to find career opportunities. He wants to change that and has an open-door policy for anyone interested to learn about aviation.

Van der Molen said: “Big concrete walls have become the nature of busy airports, whereas many years ago you could have seen children hanging on fences, watching aircraft come and go. And that creates a conducive professional interest at a young age. Schools and parents should encourage their children to look at aviation as a potential career, no matter what field. It could be anything from flying to maintenance to air traffic control or ground handling.”

He added: “There are a lot of opportunities in aviation and the industry is hungry for good people. But it needs to get better at encouraging interest from a grass roots level for those people who want to start their careers in aviation.”