SATA Azores Airlines will eliminate the loss-making routes mostly flown on ACMI flights (aircraft rental with crew, maintenance, and insurance included); Diário dos Açores has learned from sources familiar with the matter.
These routes have contributed the most to the company’s worsening results.
The decision comes as part of the operating plan for IATA Summer 2025, which is practically closed, where the main focus is on “consolidating and enhancing the Azores hub,” according to the same sources.
As such, the airline will concentrate its resources on direct operations to the Azores and on flights connecting North America and Europe via the Azores.
According to Diário dos Açores, the route the company will be withdrawing from its operation in London, the direct connections from Porto and Madeira to the USA and Canada, Ponta Delgada-Bermuda and Terceira-Oakland.


This is a bold move by SATA’s current management, as it may not please some, but it follows the plan implemented by Rui Coutinho and his team to give the company more balance and to restructure it.
The London operation, for example, has always generated negative results and very low occupancy rates, regardless of the investment made in marketing and advertising to promote the route.
In the case of the Terceira-Oakland route, SATA Azores Airlines will have the same offer in code-share with TAP on the direct flight recently announced by TAP between Terceira and San Francisco.
The other routes proved unprofitable due to the large aircraft used in those operations, degrading the average fare and the occupancy rate of the routes.
With this decision, SATA Azores Airlines will give up two of the three aircraft operating under ACMI, thus reversing decisions that Rui Coutinho had already considered less rewarding for the company.
In fact, just a few days ago, the president of SATA considered that there had been “a lot of mismanagement” at the airline for “many years,” and he doesn’t want any more planes like the “Whale” aircraft.

For Rui Coutinho, “too many mistakes were made by various people in charge, the effects of which influence the current performance” and “will continue to condition all decisions and the group’s daily and strategic management”.
The President of SATA says he wants to “save SATA,” admitting that “the path will be difficult, at times tortuous”, because “all the companies in the group have been technically bankrupt for many years” – and the group, he added, “has an extremely delicate economic and treasury situation, with immediate and long-term difficulties.”
Rui Coutinho said that the Azorean public company “has a very heavy structure,” according to its organization chart, with “directors for a lot of things,” and proposed to “see which routes are loss-making and eliminate them, in order to reduce costs,” which will now happen with the new plan to be implemented in 2025.

In Diário dos Açores-Osvaldo Cabral, director

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