South African Airways (SAA) plans to significantly reduce its flights by 23% from the end of the year. Domestic routes will be slashed by 37%, regional routes by 11% and international routes by 4%. The initiative is part of a programme to remove loss-making routes and rationalise the airline’s network. The flight reduction will be the outcome of the removal of narrow-body aircraft from the airline’s fleet, with one having already left and four more expected to leave by December 2017. The last of the five excess wide-body aircraft will exit the fleet in October 2018. These plans were revealed in a presentation by SAA executives submitted to Parliament’s standing committee on finance Wednesday.

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