ICAO Air Services Negotiations (ICAN) |28 October 2015

Accords to harness more vibrant air transport markets

A delegation from the Seychelles aviation sector met representatives from 16 countries from Asia, Europe, Africa, North America and the Middle East to discuss bilateral air services arrangements.

The meeting took place in Antalya, Turkey last week.

Seychelles was being represented at this eighth annual aviation event – the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) Air Services Negotiation – by the Seychelles Civil Aviation Authority (SCAA) chief executive Gilbert Faure, who led the delegation. The team consisted of the Air Seychelles general manager for aero political and public affairs Alan Renaud and SCAA’s head of air transport Florence Marengo.

“Our aim remains to establish a liberal legal framework to ease air services operations by commercial operators, as well as to support our national airlines’ expansion in terms of routes and codeshare expansion plans, which is slowly paving the way for the development of the Seychelles International Airport as a regional Indian Ocean hub,” said Mr Faure.

SCAA took the opportunity offered by this platform to renew agreements with countries including Russia, Israel and Belgium, and concluded new ones with others such as Denmark, Curacao, Portugal, Côte D’Ivoire and Bulgaria.

The Seychelles delegation has also taken steps to have bilateral discussions with other countries like Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Malaysia, Azerbaijan, United States of America, Thailand, Ireland and Zambia.

“A lot of efforts were this year focused in discussing with European countries so as to rally a more liberalised access to our traditional tourism niche market. In doing so, we are hoping to unleash traffic growth, improve international and reinforce regional connectivity,” said Mr Faure.
“Seychelles was praised for its achievements in promoting African and regional air connectivity by the ICAO. This is in line with our regional integration objectives as a member state of SADC, Comesa and most especially the Indian Ocean Commission,” added Mr Faure.

Following the success of the meeting, the minister responsible for transport, Joël Morgan said: “The new agreements concluded last week will contribute to the future prosperity of the country. Today, we have a total of nine scheduled airlines flying to Seychelles, physically linking our country to other countries in the world. A more liberalised air space has proven beneficial for Seychelles creating greater market access in terms of new routes, and greater frequencies which has permitted over 500,000 passenger movements, and more than 6,000 tonnes of cargo movement annually, creating a large number of business opportunities for our people, facilitating the emergence of our small enterprises, ensuring convenience and choice for consumers and easing the way we do business.”

“Discussions with Russia for example, are strategic in terms of facilitating our national airline operations to Moscow in the near future given the significant potential of Russian market as an emerging source market globally. Seychelles also met the Turkish Airlines who reiterated their strong intentions to launch operations to Seychelles,” continued the minister.

“It is important that, due to the country’s strategic location we keep hailing our efforts to strengthen our bilateral relations to ensure we remain at the forefront of our economic and social development on the international scene,” he concluded.

This year a record number of 94 member countries attended the forum, which was significantly important as ICAO celebrates the 70th anniversary of the Chicago convention.