Cabo Verde Airlines, the state-owned flag carrier of Cape Verde, will add a second aircraft to its fleet from July, when its first Boeing 737 MAX 8 is expected to arrive. The information was confirmed today by the country’s national news agency, Inforpress.
The airline confirmed the information in its Facebook page, adding that it has opened a contest in its website to decide the name of the aircraft.
The company — also known by its former name, TACV – Transportes Aéreos de Cabo Verde — currently operates a single 737-700, registered D4-CCI, wet-leased from TAAG, Angola’s national carrier.
It currently only serves Lisbon with its single aircraft, operating flights from the Cape Verdean cities of Praia, Sal and São Vicente.
According to Inforpress, the new aircraft will allow Cabo Verde Airlines to open new destinations, with the goal being returning to the markets it served before the COVID-19 pandemic — namely, a source of the agency says, “Brazil, France, the USA and Italy”.
The same source, however, mentions that there is no confirmed date for the airline’s return to Boston, Fortaleza and Paris. “When the aircraft arrives we will introduce the routes little by little, until we get to all markets where we [previously] operated”.
In the slots databases of two Northeastern Brazil airports of Fortaleza and Recife, Cabo Verde Airlines already has slots booked — which does not mean the airline will necessarily operate flights in the dates and times it has, although it signals an initial intention of doing so.
From Fortaleza, the slots reserved would be for a weekly operation to Sal from June 6 (a month before the July arrival of the 737 MAX 8), with Recife seeing two weekly operations to Praia from July 3. All frequencies, according to the database, would be operated by the airline’s 737-700.
It is more likely, thus, particularly with the dates already relatively close, that the operations start later than this, albeit there is, already, a signaled intention to return to these destinations.
TACV has had a hard time since the pandemic hit the tourism-dependent archipelago of Cape Verde. By late 2019 the airline had just been privatized to a consortium led by Loftleiðir Icelandic, a branch of Icelandair Group. It was starting an ambitious expansion by building a hub in Sal with Boeing 757-200s when COVID closed most borders.
The company was forcefully renationalized, and it finally restarted operations, now state-owned again, by December 2021 — but by then it had lost ground to other carriers.
Cabo Verde Airlines’ greatest challenge now, as it regroups post-pandemic, is to profitably remount its operations without Icelandair’s know-how. As late as last year, Cape Verde’s Minister for Tourism and Transport, Carlos Santos, had claimed the Sal hub (or rather the intention to build it) “[had] not disappeared”.
