WILL   OPEN SKIES REALLY BENEFIT AFRICA?

to the layman it all sounds French, but to aviation industry players, it’s only just the beginning of what will hopefully be a burgeoning fully fledged, competitive airline industry thereby levelling the African playing field between airlines.

The Single African Air Transport Market (“SAATM”) is one of the flagship projects of the African Union’s Agenda 2063 ensuring that aviation plays a major role in connecting Africa in achieving social, economic and political integration and boost intra-Africa trade.

Originally evolved from and known as the Yamoussoukro Declaration in 1988, which then became the Yamoussoukro Decision (“YD”) in 1999, the recently signed SAATM remains the single most important air transport reform policy initiative by African Governments to date.

Why was this agreement necessary at all? Do we not have enough airlines flying the skies, or is all not as it seems to be? This is, of course, a naïve question if you are a role player in aviation – but not to the man in the street – of which there are millions in Africa who are simply not even aware of SAATM, but will be indirectly affected at one time or another in the future.

Simply put, it means changing old aviation rules in order to let players explore undiscovered frontiers in the game. The SAATM was implemented by recognising and acknowledging that restrictive and protectionist intra-African regulations existed based primarily on Bilateral Air Services Agreements (“BASAs”). These very agreements impeded the growth and improvement of air transport on the African continent. One of the vital parts of the Decision was air service liberalisation, which was viewed as a means to develop and free up African airspace. In essence, it is meant to open up air new travel routes within Africa and allow the 23 signatories multilateral exchanges of up to fifth freedom air traffic rights between African destinations.

In order to fully understand what this actually means, we need to understand the concept of freedom of the air rights. Freedoms of the air are a set of commercial aviation rights granting a country's airline an allocated permission to enter and land in another country's airspace. The formulisation of these rights came about as a result of disagreements between international states over the extent of aviation