Something from OneDrive Memories today 3 October: an Airlink Avro RJ85 on the apron at Sir Seretse Khama International Airport, Gaborone, Botswana back in 2019.
As a regular flyer on Airlink for the last few years flights become a bit of a blur, so I don’t remember if I flew on this aircraft or if it happened to be on the apron while I was waiting for another flight.
Airlink operated a dozen of these, and a month after I saw this one they had all been retired from the Airlink fleet. Before that they used one for the first commercial flight to Saint Helena, albeit a charter flight, a route they now operate with Embraer E190-100 IGW aircraft on a weekly basis, and once a month linking with Ascension Island.
Air Botswana also operated two Avro RJ85s, retiring theirs in 2015. One of them is visible on Google Earth on the periphery of SSKIA.
Four engines on a relatively small airframe gave it good short field performance, and a high-level of redundancy when operating in remote areas, and “hot and high” airports, such as those in much of Botswana (mostly around 1,000m above mean sea-level) and South Africa.
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