According to this article on the BBC, word has come down that Air Austral has purchased not one, but two of the superjumbo Airbus A380 planes. While other airlines are outfitting them to carry more passengers in multiple classes, Austral is opting for the "budget" route and outfitting the planes to carry a whopping 840 passengers all at the economy level from their Paris-Saint-Denis route.
Given that there are only about 827,000 people in total living on the island of Réunion, it is obvious that they are planning to ply towards the holiday makers. Of course, at 11 hours in flight time and a cost of 800€ or so, it makes for a strange terminology to call this a "budget" flight as I'm much more used to seeing this applied to stag parties on Ryanair in Europe. Of course, they must obviously believe that there will be a good deal of profit in this or they would have paid the 1 billion (thousand million) USD for the two jets. And maybe there is something to be said for this approach. If it does indeed work, it might prove to be a decent model to drop the cost of flights to Africa and allow for an increase of connectedness which is most definitely needed.
Two friends, Shara Karasic and Katrina are now in Swaziland for BarCamp Swaziland which is happening on the 27th. Along the way, Shara managed to take a shot of the entertainment system during one leg of the flight (I'm assuming the Johannesburg Mbabane leg of it) and an ATM at the Joburg airport which I've included below.
While most inflight systems ATMs have a decent combination of English along with a couple of others like French, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, etc. this flight ATM had six languages that are all spoken in South Africa! Obviously English is there as well as Afrikaans, but take a look at the Sepedi, Xhosa (IsiXhosa), Zulu (IsiZulu), and Venda (Tshivenḓa). All I can say is wow. In the US you're lucky to even get two languages, despite the fact we actually have no official language.
Had to make a few corrections based on the the fact that is um... an ATM and not an inflight airline system.
