MANGI LO PLES IS BACK

 

Owner and CEO Mangi Lo Peles - Erems Wartoto gives the thumbs up!

'BIG PLANES, BUDGET AIRFARES'

YOUR favourite airline Travel Air – known for its budget low cost airfares – is coming back.

Eremas Wartoto, the owner of Travel Air, announced this yesterday saying he is looking at resuming with 3 Boeing 737-300 series aircraft.

Famous for its ‘Mangi Lo Ples’ logo featuring the iconic fuzzy wuzzy angel Raphael Oimbari, Travel Air offered low budget airfares for ordinary Papua New Guineans a decade ago.

The return of Mangi Lo Ples will be good news for the travelling public, who have been staggered by rising airfares each year since 1975.

Mr Wartoto said there were ways to reduce the costs and one was by extending airport runways to accommodate bigger planes that can carry more passengers so that the costs can be shared.

“Mangi Lo Ples is coming back because I cannot stand the costly airfare rates which are killing our citizens. Domestic airfare cost must be reasonable to allow people to travel. We are being robbed,” Mr Wartoto said.

He said once all the aviation requirements are met, Mangi Lo Ples will resume services with Boeing 737-300 series which will service major ports in the country.

“We are looking at three Boeings 737 for the start, which would be brought in from Europe. It would accommodate up to 150 passengers and three tons of cargo.

Travel Air owner Eremas Wartoto.

“We will than bring in smaller aircraft such as Q-400 and Dash-8 to service other smaller destinations. Our proposed any sector airfare rate will be at K350-K400 to anywhere in the country with cargo charged at K3 per kilogram,” Mr Wartoto said.

He added that there were also plans to improve on the sale of tickets.

“We will do away with sales office and sell our airline tickets in major shops and supermarkets.

The ticket sale would be similar to phone top up cards and would contain the ticket number. 

Once upon purchase, the traveler would contact our call center and make his booking by providing the ticket number along with his particulars and travel details.

“The reason why we plan to do this is to relief ordinary people from the stress and costs of going to sales office and waiting in line to obtain tickets,” Mr Wartoto said.

He said the services would relief a lot of citizens and the only concern was for authorities’ responsible for airports to extend the runways of major airports to accommodate bigger aircrafts.

“It’s better to have bigger aircrafts so that more people are airlifted at reasonable costs. 

To enable big planes to service major destination, the government must invest in extending runways of major airports in the country to allow citizens to travel on larger aircrafts domestically,” Mr Wartoto added.

In the meantime, Mr Wartoto said his team was working hard to meet several formalities and civil aviation requirements in order to recommence Mangi Lo Ples services."

With Jakob Pok of PC