Air Zimbabwe will reintroduce flights to the Angolan capital Luanda and capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo Kinshasa, The Herald newspaper reported on Thursday.

 

"The flights to the DRC and Angola will start on the 1st of April and will run weekly on Mondays using the 105-seater Boeing 737 aircraft, which also has a cargo capacity of four tons," the airline's spokesman David Mwenga was quoted as saying.

 

"The operation will be triangular, starting from Harare to Luanda and Kinshasa and then back directly to Harare," he said.

 

He also said flights to Guangzhou, China, which had been suspended in this month as the airline's second Boeing 767 underwent scheduled maintenance work, would resume in mid April.

 

On the domestic scene, he said, two additional flights had been added on the Harare/Kariba/Victoria Falls route. The airline would now fly to these tourist destinations on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays.

 

Mwenga said Air Zimbabwe was seeking ways of expanding its flights and was looking at destinations such as Entebbe in Uganda, Kigali in Rwanda, Bujumbura in Burundi, Windhoek in Namibia, Maputo and Beira in Mozambique, Cape Town and Durban in South Africa, Mauritius, Antananarivo in Madagascar, St Dennis in Reunion and Addis Ababa in Ethiopia.

 

He said the airline was currently in talks with Ethiopian Airlines on a code-share partnership, which would add value to Air Zimbabwe's customers and operations.

 

Air Zimbabwe ceased flying to Luanda in January 2001 because of the war situation in that country while flights to Kinshasa stopped in February 2002.

 

(Xinhua News Agency March 30, 2007)