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The journey to re-branding Virgin Nigeria Airways has finally begun, as the airline over the weekend dumped Virgin Atlantic as its technical partner.
This follows the signing of a technical service agreement (TSA) between Virgin Nigeria Airways and Ethiopian Airlines emerging as the first two African airlines to sign such, covering training, maintenance and resource pooling, and signaling a major boost in technical cooperation among African airlines. According to Francis Ayigbe, corporate communications manager of Virgin Nigeria, the signing in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia by Girma Wake, managing director of Ethiopian Airlines and Dapo Olumide, chief executive officer, Virgin Nigeria Airways, signals the cementing and commencement of technical partnership between both airlines.
Both Girma Wake and Dapo Olumide leading top managements of both airlines paid glowing tribute to the possibility of collaboration among African business and commercial interests, describing the TSA as the first effective action among African airlines representing West and East Africa bloc.
Ethiopian Airlines with 34 wide body aircraft and an order for another 36 made up of B787 Dreamliner and B777LR, last week, posted a profit of $117 million in the face of global financial losses of major American, European, and Asian airlines.
Ayigbe said the new technical service agreement with Ethiopian Airlines effectively ends the technical partnership between Virgin Nigeria and Virgin Atlantic Airlines.
Dapo Olumide moments after the ceremony at Ethiopian Airlines headquarters described the new deal as “A paradigm shift that changes the way airlines function; it shows an audacity for Nigerian airline to partner another African airline, which by the way is more profitable than all European Airlines combined; this is completely unheard of in Africa”
According to him, “the maintenance of all our B737 aircraft will be done with Ethiopian Airlines, but there are a host of other opportunities, which includes training of our pilots, cabin crew, engineers; they have a vast and extensive network in training, this is one African airline that is actually bigger than most European companies”.