The story
Camair-co was created on 11 September 2006 by decree of Paul Biya, the President of Cameroon, as a company aimed at replacing Cameroon Airlines, the country's national airline at that time. The IATA code QC previously belonged to Air Corridor, which has since ceased operations. Cameroon Airlines was shut down in June 2008, but it took until 2011 for Camair-Co to launch flight services. The inaugural flight from Douala to Paris via Yaoundé took place on 28 March. On 30 September 2016 the airline ceased services to Paris as part of a network restructuring exercise.
Lossmaking since its launch in 2011, the Camair-Co reportedly had debts about 35 billion Central African CFA franc, and the Agency for Aerial Navigation Safety in Africa and Madagascar (ASECNA) had ordered the company to pay its arrears of royalties amounting to 100,390 million FCFA, under suspension of air navigation services.
Camair-Co was the subject of a recovery plan proposed by the US firm Boeing Consulting in 2016, which included settlement of the outstanding debt, the injection of FCFA 60 billion, resizing of the network and the modernisation of the fleet, but the plan has not been implemented.
In 2020, Paul Biya, the president of Cameroon, ordered urgent restructuring to facilitate the selling of a controlling share in the airline to a "strategic private investor." In 2023, the IMF placed Camair-Co under a performance contract, along with other state-owned enterprises.
From Wikipedia’s article on Camair-Co, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3