South Africa Airline Development - NOW LIVE

[RStretton]

Banner_SA by rstretton, on Flickr

I've been working on new website content a lot this week and this is my first new non-blog content since the site went live. Originally the nation development pages where primarily going to just showcase my Excel based airline dev maps, but they have grown into something much more as I've investigated the history of aviation in the countries concerned.

South Africa is particularly interesting since it deregulated the marketplace, because the nation is relatively small and has a major focus on three specific routes: 'the Golden Triangle'. There have been plenty of start ups from Flitestar to 1Time to Nationwide but the marketplace is still dominated by the SAA and Comair groups, including their low-cost offspring Kulula and Mango.

Anyway there's plenty to read on my new page on this topic plus two more of my airline dev maps also covering all airline's of any size to have operated from 1990-2014. So I'm not just about the classics - I'm increasingly interested in how the modern realms of aviation have been changed by increasing liberalisation, new aircraft and low cost carriers.

http://yesterdaysairlines.weebly.com/south-africa.html

My next nation of interest is likely to be Mexico so keep an eye out for more updates and I hope you are enjoying the site as much as I'm enjoying writing it!

South African Airways Trio by rstretton, on Flickr

[RStretton]

Checking in the database it is interesting to see how little South Africa has been covered in 1:400. There have been 68 models made in 1:400 but of these almost all are SAA aircraft.



The others are:



(1) 1Time: Phoenix have done 1 DC-9 (on their not very good mould)

(5) Comair: 3 BA World Tail 727s and 2 737-200s

(1) Kulula: Phoenix zip scheme 737-400 (another not very good mould)



Within SAA the breakdown is:



(55) SAA Mainline

(1) Mango: Phoenix's upcoming 737-800 (shame about the nosegear size)

(2) SA Airlink: 2 Jet-X 146s

(1) SA Express: 1 Gemini DHC-8Q400



Plus there have been two non-airline releases.



There's certainly room for some additional models. Ideally they'd be:



Aeroclassics Flitestar A320





Aeroclassics 1Time DC-9





Gemini 1Time MD-80s







Gemini Nationwide One-Eleven 500





Phoenix Nationwide 767-300





Aeroclassics Nationwide 727-200





Aeroclassic Kulula 737-800







Gemini Kulula 737-400





Aeroclassics Sun Air DC-9-30

[eugenevh]

Yes! With such a rich history, it is very sad that so few models have been released.

I would also like a couple of the Kulula MD-80 series models released as well as subjects like Court Line (later CHC) Convair 580's
and Phoenix (the airline, not the model company) B727s and Velvet Sky B737 and FlySafair B737 and Safair L100, BAe 146 and Boeing 707 models to name but a few and dont forget the Comair CityJet schemes (pre-Kulula and British Airways franchise) Fokker F100, B727, B737 and Namib Air (pre-Air Namibia) B737 too. So many to be done.

At least we had the Ciskei International CV990 done by Aeroclassics as well (although it was a real white elephant).