Tropical Air of Zanzibar starts scheduled flights to Mbeya.

It's once again good news to the citizens of southern highland regions of Tanzania, and the flying community in general as Tropical air of Zanzibar starts scheduled  operations to Mbeya (MBI). On Friday 19th July 2013 Tropical Air's ATR42-300 landed at Songwe International Airport ( HTGW) for the first time marking the beginning of the airline's scheduled flights from Zanzibar to Mbeya via Dar es salaam.

 

According to the information on its website, Tropical air will be flying to Mbeya three times in a week. Flights will be on Monday, Wednesday and Friday using an ATR42-300 with fares starting at 180,000TZS.

 

Mbeya promo - Tropical Air.

 

Flights schedules can be accessed here: Time table June 2013

 

Tropical Air is the first locally-owned Zanzibar aviation company in Tanzania. It started operations in 1999 with only one single engine-aircraft, 5H-PKD a Cessna F172N. It's fleet now consist of:

• 4 Cessna C208Bs
• a Eurocopter  AS350B2 helicopter
• a LET410 UVP E20, and
• 2 ATR42-300s

 

Tropical Air becomes the second airline to fly scheduled flights to Mbeya after Precision Air.  Precision Air (PW) was the first to operate into MBI just after the inauguration of the airport early  this year. We are now expecting to see a challenging competition between these two airlines out of which we expect the beneficiary will be the flying community.

 

Since the inauguration of the Songwe international Airport there has been a growing number of passengers travelling by air which necessitated the increase in flights. In order to cater for this demand Precision Air increased its flights from 4 a week to daily flights.

 

 

The major challenge at the Songwe Airport is lack of infrastructure logistics especially Jet A1 availability.  Lack of Jet fuel has caused airlines to carry round-trip fuel from Dar es salaam hence leaving behind passengers and cargo. Both Precision Air and Tropical Air do carry return fuel from DAR on their ATR's. This is a very big set back to airlines performance and it's the customers who bear a burden through high travelling fares.

 

We at aviationtz as aviation enthusiasts we congratulate Tropical Air for expanding their service base through exploring new scheduled routes.