Air Tanzania: The Revival of the State Airline and the New Route to Moscow

History and positioning

The near-collapse of the fleet in 2016 pushed the Tanzanian government to intervene directly, buying new aircraft rather than relying on leasing, a choice that allowed the airline to rebuild a relatively young fleet in a few years and to go from the single aircraft of 2016 to 16 in 2026.

The fleet

The renewal included the arrival of Boeing 787-8 Dreamliners for intercontinental routes, Airbus A220s for medium haul and Bombardier Q400s for the shortest regional routes, a combination that lets the airline cover both short-haul African links and its first attempts at intercontinental expansion. In the 2025/26 budget the government earmarked about 109 million dollars to strengthen the airline, of which 71.5 million specifically for the purchase of new aircraft.

Routes and network

The African regional network includes destinations such as Johannesburg, Harare, Lusaka, Entebbe, Bujumbura, Kinshasa, Victoria Falls, Accra and Cape Town, in addition to intercontinental links to Mumbai. The most significant news of 2026 is the opening, from July 1, of a direct route between Dar es Salaam and Moscow Vnukovo with three weekly frequencies, the first step in a plan that the Tanzanian ministry of transport has said it wants to extend in the future to London and the United States, as the fleet continues to grow.

Within East and Southern Africa, or to India, Air Tanzania now offers a growing network; on the intercontinental front to Europe and North America, however, it still lags behind the plans stated by the government. Anyone following the airline's progress should expect new route announcements in the coming years, since fleet growth is explicitly tied to public funds allocated year by year, so the pace of new openings depends more on the state budget than on normal market logic.