I’m writing this from Addis Ababa bole international airport, waiting for my connection to Kilimanjaro. We arrived here some 3 hours back, on a direct flight from bangalore.
The flight was fine, and uneventful. It was possibly half empty, though – the guy in the front seat had all 3 seats to himself and had lay down across them.
Maybe the only issue with the flight was that they gave us “dinner” at the ungodly time of 3am (1230 Eastern Africa time). I know why – airlines prefer to serve as soon as they take off since food is freshest then (rather than reheating at the end of the flight). And if they serve two meals the second one is usually a cold one (sandwiches cakes etc)
The airport here is also uneventful. There are a couple of bars and a few nondescript looking coffee shops. It is linear, with all gates being laid out in a row (reminds me of KL, and very unlike “star shaped airports” such as Barcelona or Delhi).
In any case I’ve been doing the rounds since morning looking for information of my flight gate. The last time I saw it hadn’t yet been published. But there was something very interesting about the flight schedule.
Basically, this airport serves as a cross dock between Africa and the rest of the world, taking advantage of its location in one corner of the continent.
For example, all flights that have either departed in the last hour or due to depart in the next 2 hours are to various destinations in Africa (barring one flight to São Paulo and Buenos Aires).
Kinshasa. Cape Town. Douala. Antananarivo. Entebbe. Accra. Lubumbashi via Lilongwe. Mine to Kilimanjaro (and then onward to Zanzibar). Etc. etc.
No flight that goes north or east, barring one to Djibouti. And no take offs between 6am (when we landed here) till 815 (Cape Town). And until around 8, people kept streaming into the airport (and the lines at the toilets kept getting longer!)
Ethiopian’s schedule at bangalore is also strange. Flights arrive at 8am 3 days of the week and then hang in there idly till 230 am the next morning. Time wise, that’s incredibly low utilisation of a costly asset like an aircraft (that said it’s a Boeing 737Max).
After looking at the airport schedule though it makes more sense to me. Basically in the morning, flights bring in passengers from all over Asia and Europe, and connect them to various places in Africa.
In the evenings, flights stream in from all around Africa and cross dock people to destinations in Europe and Asia. Currently the cross dock is one way – out of Africa in the evenings and into Africa in the mornings.
This means that there are some destinations where, given time of travel, the only way to make this cross dock work is to keep the aircraft idle at the destination. In African destinations for example, I expect shorter turnarounds – this morning I noticed that the first set of departures were to far away locations – Cape Town, Johannesburg, Accra, Harare and then to Lusaka, etc.
I don’t expect this to last long though. In a few years (maybe already delayed by the pandemic) I expect ethiopian to double its flight capacity across all existing destinations. Then, it can operate both into Africa and out of Africa cross docks twice in a day. And won’t need to waste precious flight depreciation time at faraway airports such as bangalore.
PS: so far I haven’t seen a single flight from any other airline apart from Ethiopian at the airport here.