Air Zimbabwe isn’t flying to London—it’s just a Spanish charter with a Zimbabwean sticker

There is no denying that the recent announcement of direct flights between Harare and London Gatwick is a welcome development.

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For over fourteen years, thousands of Zimbabweans in the diaspora, business travelers, and tourists have endured long, grueling transit stops through regional and international hubs simply to travel between the United Kingdom and Zimbabwe.

Eliminating those exhausting layovers and restoring direct long-haul connectivity is a practical win for passengers.

Anyone who has spent hours sitting in transit lounges will naturally applaud the convenience that a non-stop flight brings.

However, amidst the triumphant official rhetoric, state announcements, and political back-patting, a fundamental distinction is being deliberately blurred.

The public is being fed a narrative that Air Zimbabwe itself has miraculously turned a corner, expanded its operational capacity, or acquired a modern wide-body jet to reclaim its place in the international skies.

The reality behind the scenes tells a very different story, and confusing commercial arrangement with structural capability does a disservice to public accountability.

What is actually taking place between Harare and London is an arrangement known in the aviation industry as a wet lease, or an ACMI contract—standing for Aircraft, Crew, Maintenance, and Insurance.

Under this thirteen-month deal, Air Zimbabwe is not flying its own aircraft, nor is it deploying its own Zimbabwean pilots, cabin crew, or engineers.

The entire operation is outsourced to a Spanish charter operator, Plus Ultra Líneas Aéreas.

Plus Ultra provides the Airbus A330, supplies the Spanish flight deck and cabin crew, handles all technical upkeep, and maintains the primary insurance.

Air Zimbabwe’s role is almost entirely commercial: it provides the route rights, sells the tickets, puts its flight code on the booking system, and handles passenger check-in at the terminal.

To understand how misleading it is to portray this as a revival of Air Zimbabwe’s internal capacity, consider a simple everyday comparison.

Imagine an individual who hires a plain, unbranded white coach—complete with a foreign driver, fuel, and mechanical team—and slaps a paper sign with their own name near the door.

If that individual sets up a folding table at the terminal, sells tickets, and points passengers to that rented bus, can they genuinely claim to the public that they have established a brand-new, fully equipped bus company operating between Bulawayo and Harare?

Of course not.

Renting a turnkey service from a third party does not make you a transport magnate.

It simply makes you a ticket broker using someone else’s equipment and manpower.

When the lease expires or the daily rental fee becomes unsustainable, the bus returns to its owner, leaving the broker with no fleet, no trained drivers, and no permanent infrastructure.

This distinction matters because wet leasing is often an extraordinarily expensive, short-term stopgap.

While it allows Air Zimbabwe to bypass the reality that its own long-haul jets are grounded and that the airline remains on European aviation safety ban lists, it builds zero long-term institutional capacity.

It does not train young Zimbabwean pilots on wide-body jets, it does not upskill local engineers, and it does not increase the tangible capital assets of our national carrier.

Instead of building domestic capacity, the lion’s share of ticket revenues under an ACMI contract leaves the country to cover foreign salaries, foreign maintenance, and foreign aircraft leases.

Pragmatic business solutions to temporary problems are understandable, and utilizing a wet lease to test high-demand routes is a recognized strategy across global aviation.

But honesty in public governance demands that we call things by their proper names.

Celebrating a temporary, outsourced charter agreement as the glorious resurrection of our national airline’s operational prowess is an exercise in political misrepresentation.

We can certainly be pleased that direct travel between Harare and London is back on the schedule for the convenience of our people.

But let us not be deceived by state actors eager to turn a hired Spanish aircraft into a illusion of domestic progress.

Until Air Zimbabwe clears its regulatory hurdles, fixes its balance sheet, and flies its own airworthy fleet with local personnel, the national carrier has not truly resumed flying to London.

It has simply hired someone else to do the heavy lifting.

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