Mozambique Airlines (LAM) cancelled domestic flights again today, in this case on the route between Maputo, in the south, and Quelimane, in the centre of the country, due to an aircraft breakdown, a recurring scenario in recent weeks.
‘The fault was detected when the aircraft was preparing to take off at Maputo International Airport. In order to guarantee the operational safety of the aircraft, it was sent for intervention by the technical team,’ explains LAM, in a statement sent to Lusa, about the cancellation of today’s flight.
On April 4, LAM had also cancelled flights on three routes to Cape Town (South Africa) and the cities of Tete and Quelimane, in central Mozambique, also ‘due to the unavailability of one of the aircraft’.
For several years, the state-owned company LAM, which is currently being restructured, has been facing operational problems related to a reduced fleet and a lack of investment, with a number of incidents, not fatal, linked by experts to poor aircraft maintenance.
At the end of March, one of the company’s aircraft had to be flown to Maputo airport after colliding with birds, causing damage to the aircraft, the second such case in a week, also forcing the cancellation of flights.
On 31 January, Linhas Aéreas de Moçambique went ahead with a procedure to try to contract the supply of Embraer ERJ190 and Boeing 737-700 aircraft, according to a notice previously reported by Lusa, but the results of the tender are not yet known.
It involved the submission of expressions of interest for the supply of aircraft, of these two models, by national or foreign companies or consortia until 07 February.
A source from the airline explained to Lusa that this procedure did not have quantities of aircraft to be contracted, a decision that depends on the proposals submitted in this tender.
In the current restructuring process, LAM has kept Cape Town as its only destination outside the country, concentrating on the domestic market since February.
In January, the company returned its Boeing 737-300 cargo plane to Indonesia after a year without operating it, due to the lack of national certification and recognition of the aircraft’s modifications by the manufacturer, the aviation regulator previously confirmed.
‘It was found that not all the documents required for this type of certification were complete,’ said the chairman of the board of the Mozambican Civil Aviation Institute (IACM), the regulatory authority, João de Abreu.
At issue is the return of the Boeing 737-300 cargo plane to its country of origin, Indonesia, confirmed in a statement by LAM on the grounds that it ‘did not have national certification’, clarifying that it remained in Mozambique from 31 December 2023 to 18 January 2025.
João de Abreu explained that the cargo aircraft never operated in Mozambique due to the lack of national certification, adding that it was also modified from a passenger aircraft to a cargo aircraft without the due knowledge of the manufacturer, who was also not notified.
Lusa
