Africa is an ideal continent for low cost “no frill” airlines due to its poor road infrastructure and vast wilderness between cities, Fastjest’s CEO and Executive chairman told BBC in an interview, adding that regional routes lack effective competition and are underserviced and overpriced.

“Most cities in Africa are a long way from each other and are separated by deserts, rivers, jungles and very rarely a road. So aviation should enable people to move around,” Ed Winters, 65, said.

Winters, said his budget airline that operates in serves four major cities in Tanzania with onward flights to Lusaka in Zambia and Johannesburg in South Africa, was in the best position to capitalize on this infrastructure deficiency.

Many low-cost carriers have failed in Africa and particularly in South Africa where they struggle to compete with the national carrier SAA which is the beneficiary of subsidies from the government. A number of national carriers also benefit from patriotism but Winter does not believe this will be a challenge for Fastjet.

“South Africa is far more developed than the other African countries. The benefit of subsidies that SAA has does not encourage them to be efficient,” Winters said, adding that Fastjet chose Tanzania because the government was very welcoming and that they felt that it was an economy with sufficient number of middle-class and with a large number of routes

“In our first six months in Tanzania, 38 percent of our travelers were first time fliers who were previously using buses for long journeys. We saw that was a model that was going to work well.”

Fastjet’s subsidiary, Fly540 stopped its operation in Ghana and Angola in May this year in a continent wide restructuring program to help  it concentrate on profitable markets in East and Southern Africa.