With more than 25 years of experience in the aviation sector, an aviation and airport specialist says he has never seen an airport inaugurated “with such pomp and circumstance” only to be closed shortly afterward.
In an interview with Valor Económico, he warns that the new airport is causing huge losses to the State, calls for the creation of incentives to encourage the emergence of new operators in the market, and proposes greater interconnection between domestic airports, which he describes as “white elephants.”
According to Pedro Castro, it is time to shut down TAAG, as “no private investor would accept to buy it — not even for one dollar.”
“When I look at Angola, and especially considering that it is the seventh-largest country in Africa, I conclude that this vast territory has a mobility problem. There is no efficient highway network, nor a fast and reliable railway network. Therefore, any journey in Angola that is not made by plane is a long one. That’s why air travel is so important — both for movement within the country and for connections with neighboring regions and countries. Yet, in this large nation, only two cities have airports capable of receiving international flights: Luanda and Benguela,” he explains.
He points to Ethiopian Airlines in Addis Ababa and Royal Air Maroc in Casablanca as the most obvious cases in Africa. Without these airlines, those airports “would not be major hubs at all, as they would lack the carrier to make them function that way.”
Valor Económico, 10/09/2025“It’s very important to distinguish between infrastructure and the business model of the economic operator. They are two completely different things,” he concludes.
