Business a.m. Reporter
When Emirates Airline returns its now two years suspended Dubai-Lagos-Dubai flights in October as it recently announced, the two-way trip would take an additional one hour and fifty minutes more than it did before the suspension.
The additional time is the result of a rerouting that the airline will need to undertake in order to avoid closed airspace, just as it does for various other African destinations, it has emerged.
According to available information, when the airline last flew from Dubai to Lagos, the flight took seven hours and forty minutes (7h 40m). But when it resumes in October, it will take eight hours and thirty-five minutes (8h 35m) between Dubai and Lagos. The return flight from Lagos to Dubai (UAE) that was seven hours and forty-five minutes (7h 45m) will now take eight hours and forty minutes (8h 40m).
Before the flights were suspended, Emirates had flown to Nigeria for 18 years from 2004 to 2022 and the abrupt suspension had principally resulted from the inability of the carrier to repatriate its revenues in dollars as Nigeria faced scarcity of foreign exchange. The airline considered there was no point flying hundreds of thousands of passengers annually and being unable to benefit financially from it.
While Emirates suspended its flights to Lagos, other international long haul airlines were still flying into Nigeria, including Qatar Airways, which flies into Lagos twice daily and Abuja daily, with four of its weekly Abuja flights continuing to Kano, and three continuing to Port Harcourt.
The longer flying time for the two-way Dubai-Lagos-Dubai flight is due to rerouting as a result of closed airspace in Africa. For instance, to avoid Sudanese airspace that was closed last year, Qatar Airways is said to fly southbound to Nigeria.
“This routing takes it through Saudi Arabia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and so on, benefiting from tailwinds. Returning to Doha, it usually flies northbound. To avoid Libyan airspace, it overflies Niger, Algeria, Tunisia, across the Med, and so on,” per Simple Flying.
Flightradar24 information shows that Accra, not far from Lagos, tends to be served on the southbound route in both directions, leading observers wanting to see what would happen with Lagos.
Many believe that Emirates will also have to carry out this rerouting for its returning Dubai-Lagos-Dubai flights.
According to experts, rerouting involves higher fuel consumption, longer trip times, less competitive schedules, among others. The schedules have been changed in such a way that ensures mass connectivity was unaffected, without which the routes would be unsustainable.
When Emirates returns to Lagos in October it will be its 21st African passenger destination and it will bring its daily flights to Africa to 26 but still lower than pre-pandemic times.
The return of the flights has been much in speculation, including some open disclosures that they would return but which never materialised in the past year.
Now, it would return October 1, on Nigeria’s independence anniversary, which would suggest some sort of anniversary gift to the country. The Emirates daily flights will be on the Boeing 777-300ER, the airline’s statement said.
Lagos is 21st African destination
When it returns, Lagos will be the carrier’s 21st destination in Africa to see passenger aircraft. The airline is yet to disclose when Abuja, which it served between 2014 and 2022, will return.
According to Simple Flying, information as of May 16 suggests that Emirates will have an average of 26 daily departures from Dubai to Africa in November (the first complete month of the northern winter season based on IATA slot seasons), with Africa having about one in ten Emirates departures, representing 11 percent.
The analysis also shows that Emirates Africa departures will be up by about seven percent (7%) compared to November 2023 (good) but down by 14 percent compared to the same month in 2019 (bad). There’s no Abuja or Khartoum, and Lagos flights will be down from double daily in 2019. Other destinations have fewer services than before.
