During a recent Council of Ministers, President Abdelmadjid Tebboune expressed the wish to see an air hub created in Tamanrasset to serve African metropolises. It would be part of the government plan to develop the air transport sector in Algeria. This project would be one of the biggest launched in the country.
A first Algerian hub
1,600 kilometers from Algiers, the Tamanrasset site occupies a strategic position which corresponds well to the concept of hub. This air transport mechanism means that flights (mainly from Europe here) converge on the platform. Then passengers and freight, after a limited connection time, leave on other flights to Africa. Since the late 1980s, this system has worked well at many airports around the world in Atlanta, Chicago, London, Amsterdam, Roissy-CDG, Frankfurt, Madrid, Dubai, Doha, Addis Ababa, etc. It relies on big airlines like Delta, American, British Airways, KLM, Air France, Lufthansa, Iberia, Emirates, Qatar Airways, Ethiopian Airlines, etc.
But a hub cannot be created from scratch with the wave of a magic wand. Several rules are essential for success.
A challenge for Algerian economic circles
To be profitable, the operation on a turntable must be supported by a local customer base of passengers which represents at least 30% of the filling of the planes. However, it does not exist in Tamanrasset, where there are less than 100,000 passengers per year.
Global hubs, as we have seen, are associated with powerful airlines. In the case of Algeria, the current national company has other priorities to manage before turning to a mode of growth which is not without risks. And competition to Africa already exists. Royal Air Maroc is very efficient from its Casablanca hub. To a certain extent, Turkish Airlines brings together at the new Istanbul airport passengers mainly from northern Europe who then leave for Dakar, Abidjan, Conakry, Lagos, etc. Creating a new major company in Algeria which would operate around fifty planes will require billions of dollars and decades …
Finally, the Tamanrasset-Aguenar-Hadj Bey Akhamok airport does not only have advantages. Its high altitude (1,377 meters) and the temperature, which can reach 35 ° C, can hamper the take-off performance of planes and limit the payload, even when using the longest runway of 3,600 meters.
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