Malawi: National flag carrier, Air Malawi, on Thursday recovered from its eight-day coma when its ATR 42 bounced back into operation.
Air Malawi last week suspended all its flights due to lack of planes after the expiry of a lease agreement on its Boeing737 200 which was leased from Bravo Capital Limited of America.
The situation was worsened by a C-check maintenance the ATR 42 was undergoing.
Air Malawi chief executive officer Patrick Chilambe told The Nation last week that the ATR 42 would bounce back on Monday to service the domestic routes as well as fly to Harare in Zimbabwe, Lusaka in Zambia and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.
But the ATR failed to take off on Monday due to what Air Malawi head of marketing Tony Chimpukuso described as prolonged maintenance.
“The aircraft will resume its operations today [Thursday] because everything is now fixed as it went through C-check maintenance for a week.”
“The ATR 42 did not resume its operations on Monday because there were some other prescribed jobs that were not evaluated that was why we shifted the date to Thursday because we needed more time to fix the problems,” said Chimpukuso.
He said Air Malawi wanted to rectify all the problems before the ATR 42 could resume flying to avoid suspending it again for the same problems in the future.
Chimpukuso said the aeroplane is now better and reliable and assured the public that they will travel well as everything is under control.
Despite the resurrection of the ATR 42, Air Malawi’s flights to Johannesburg remain suspended “until arrangements to lease a better and more reliable aircraft have been finalised.”
