East African Carrier, Uganda Airlines is in a process of increasing it fleet with the acquisition of six new aircraft.
According to chimpreports.com, the national career is reported to have started receiving bids for the planes last week.
Jennifer Bamuturaki, the airline CEO says at least three leading manufactures placed their bids so far.
“Everyone is pitching; Airbus is pitching, Boeing is pitching and Embraer is pitching, but as Uganda Airlines, what we are interested in is a mid-range aircraft,” she told the East African newspaper.
Delegations from the three airlines, the paper reports, were in Kampala last week to meet with Ugandan Airlines and Ministry of Works and Transport, as well as the Civil Aviation Authority officials.
The 6 planes will be acquired in two phases; two passenger and one cargo planes first, and another pair of passengers and one cargo plane later.
Uganda Airlines is currently operating a fleet of six; 4 Bombardier CRJ900s and two Airbus A330-800s.
It has however, struggled to maximize turnover from its African route which are operated by the CRJ900s.
While the narrow body 76-seater can reach most parts of the continent by range, it is severely weight-limited, imposing a trade-off between loading passengers and baggage.
The airline’s skyrocketing loss of Shs 266Billion has also been partly blamed on the slow route development and a mismatch between passenger volumes and the higher cost of operating its Airbus A330 on the Entebbe-Dubai route.
As Uganda Airlines returns to the market, is understood that Airbus is offering its highly sought after A321, while Boeing is offering 737 Max.
The 737 Max recently returned to service, having been grounded world over, from March 2019 to November 2020, following a recurring failure in the Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), which resulted in two major crashes, namely Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302.
