Start-up airline, Kalahari Airways will commence operations from early 2014 with daily flights from Cape Town to London Gatwick, with a 30-minute stopover in Gaborone. Based in Botswana, Kalahari Airlines intends to deploy three ex-Qantas B747-400s on the route using a planned $30million lease purchase facility with a standby facility of $10m to comply with the Civil Aviation Authority of Botswana’s (CAAB) working capital minimums.
CEO, Denis Coghlan has been planning the flights since British Airways ceased operations on the GBE-LON route, which he maintains has sufficient demand for it to be profitable.