Every airline has to choose a first route, and the choice says a good deal about what the airline thinks it is for. Ours goes to Accra.
The decision took eighteen months. It started, as these things do, with traffic data: who is already flying between Freetown and the rest of West Africa, how they get there today, and what that journey costs them in money and in hours. The answer was not flattering to the region. A trip our neighbours could make in ninety minutes was routinely taking a full day, a connection through a third country, and a hotel night nobody had planned for.
Why Accra, and not somewhere closer
Conakry and Monrovia are nearer, and both are firmly in phase one. But Accra does something the shorter hops cannot: it carries enough business, trade and diaspora traffic in both directions to fill an aircraft on a schedule, in a low season as well as a high one. A launch route has to be dependable before it is ambitious.
We ran three separate fare studies before settling on a structure. The first two assumed we would price against the existing one-stop itineraries. The third assumed we would price against the decision not to travel at all, and that is the one that shaped the final fares.
The argument about 07:15
The longest discussion in the whole process was about what time to leave. A mid-morning departure is easier on crews and kinder to the turnaround. An early one is worth more to the passenger, because it puts them in Accra with a working day still ahead of them and lets them come home the same evening.
We went early. The Accra rotation departs Freetown at 07:15, which means a same-day return is genuinely possible rather than technically possible. It also means the aircraft is back at Lungi in time to be useful for the rest of the day, which matters a great deal when you are operating a small fleet.
The schedule carries deliberate buffer. We built it against the turnaround times Lungi actually delivers rather than the ones we would like it to deliver, and we widened the margins again for the rainy season. A timetable that holds is worth more than a timetable that looks fast on paper.