On 8 May, South Africa’s Airlink suspended its service from Pretoria’s Wonderboom National Airport to Cape Town International. The airline had initially used Avro RJ85s on the route, with RJ85 ZS-ASW (msn E2313) flying the inaugural service in August 2015. However, traffic on the route did not develop as the airline had hoped, and smaller Embraer ERJ 135s took over some of the services. In recent times, ERJs operated most of the flights, with the last visit by an RJ85 taking place when ZS-SYO (msn E2394) flew a roundtrip from Pretoria to Cape Town as SA 8679/8676 on 25 March; she then ferried back to Johannesburg. 

Previous news items on Airlink:

• Airlink helps cover routes of grounded SA Express (2018-05-27)
• Airlink barred from merging with Safair (2018-02-24)
• Airlink to merge with Safair (2017-11-27)
• Airlink Avro RJ85 suffers uncontained engine failure (2017-11-09)
• Airlink puts Embraer 190 into service (2017-08-04)