The loss-making state airline Air Zimbabwe carried just 230 000 passengers last year, compared with more than a million in 1999, the official media reported on Friday.
Acting chief executive Captain Oscar Madombwe blamed the decline on negative publicity on political and economic turmoil in the country and a perception of safety concerns among both local and foreign travellers, along with shortages of hard currency, new equipment and gasoline, the state Herald newspaper said.
Madombwe was addressing a panel of lawmakers in Harare on Thursday.
He said some of the airline’s planes are nearly 30 years old and passengers mistrust its newest acquisitions, two small short-haul Chinese MA60 aircraft used on domestic routes since last year, preferring what he called Western-manufactured planes.
Madombwe said acute shortages in jet fuel mean some of its international flights, including regular services to London, are forced to take on fuel in neighbouring countries, leading to delays.
Some Western governments issue adverse travel advisories to their nationals on Zimbabwe, the airline chief told the lawmakers.
”There are travel warnings in which travellers are told: ‘Go to Zimbabwe at your own risk and maybe you will not come out of there alive.’ We are going to embark on campaigns to counter the bad publicity,” the paper quoted him saying.
In November, the airline ran out of jet fuel and grounded all its services for a day as Zimbabwe’s worst economic crisis since independence in 1980 deepened. It was the first time the airline’s planes were brought to a complete standstill by fuel shortages. Then-chief executive Tendai Mahachi and financial director Tendai Mujuru were fired for their handling of fuel shortages.
Madombwe assured the lawmakers new arrangements had been made to keep the airline flying but did not elaborate.
Zimbabwe is suffering shortages of all types of fuel. The agriculture-based economy went into free fall after President Robert Mugabe ordered the often violent seizures of thousands of white-owned commercial farms in 2000. – Sapa-AP