I’ll be completely honest, when I got sent information regarding the post, I hadn’t actually heard of the airline before. Air Kiribati is based in Kiribati which is a state in Micronesia located in the South Pacific Ocean, just a little over 2,000km away from Fiji.
The airline is extremely small with a fleet size of only 5 aircraft and 29 routes. The airline will expand it’s fleet as they ordered 2 brand new Embraer E190-E2 aircraft which they will take delivery of sometime this year.
Air Kiribati Twin Otter (Image – Air Kiribati)
The airline has been eyeing Australian services with this aircraft for some time and Brisbane was one of the focus airports. Well, it looks like the airline has chosen where they’d like to operate from and the date is sooner than you may have thought.
Air Kiribati has applied for permission and authorisation to start services from Brisbane to Tarawa via Honiara and Nauru which they would like to start on the 11th of March 2020 and operate twice weekly.
The airline will operate the following return flight: Tarawa to Nauru to Honiara and finally, Brisbane.
The airline will obviously be using their new Embraers on the route once they take delivery of them.
Here is the full document to read all of the extra information regarding cargo and other flight information relevant to the upcoming service.
Air Kiribati E190-E2 (Image – Embraer)
As you can see from above, that’s not too long away. I think this is really exciting for the airline as it’s their first large passenger aircraft and big international destination.
The airline already works alongside Solomon Airlines to operate a once a week service to Tarawa but I think it’ll be interesting to see how the route performs.
I mentioned I hadn’t even heard of them but after seeing this news, I’m quite interested to see what the passenger experience would be like on the carrier, it’d also be a good opportunity to see some interesting islands and tick off and aircraft I haven’t yet flown.
Have you heard of Air Kiribati before?
