On 17 September 2026 British Airways announced its network for summer 2027. Most of it was the usual business of frequencies going up and down: Cape Town from seven flights a week to ten, Las Vegas from thirteen to fourteen, Buenos Aires going daily with an onward leg to Santiago.

The line that stood out was Tanzania. From 29 May to 31 October 2027, three times a week, a Boeing 777 will leave Gatwick for Kilimanjaro, carry on to Zanzibar, and then fly back to Gatwick. It is a triangle, not an out-and-back.

Leg by leg

BA's published schedule makes the shape of the day easy to follow. All times are local.

Leg one: Gatwick to Kilimanjaro. Departs 09:05, arrives 20:20. Tanzania is two hours ahead of the UK in summer, so that is nine hours and fifteen minutes gate to gate, over a great-circle distance of roughly 4,360 miles.

Leg two: Kilimanjaro to Zanzibar. Departs 21:20, arrives 22:25. An hour and five minutes, and only around 240 miles. That is a very short flight for an aircraft the size of a 777, which is normally built for sectors many times that length.

Leg three: Zanzibar to Gatwick. Departs 00:25, arrives 07:55. Nine and a half hours overnight, around 4,600 miles, landing at Gatwick in time for the morning.

Outbound flights run on Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays, with the returns arriving on Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays.

Why it matters on a tracker

A triangle routing changes what you see if you follow the aircraft. The jet that climbs out of Gatwick in the morning does not simply turn round at Kilimanjaro. It takes off again an hour later for a short hop to the coast, and the aircraft that lands back in Sussex the next morning is coming home from Zanzibar, not from where it first went.

For anyone watching a flight tracker, that is the fun of it. Two of the three legs are long-haul, one is about the distance from London to Newcastle, and all three are flown by the same widebody.

Back to Tanzania

It is also a return. British Airways suspended its flights to Dar es Salaam at the end of March 2013, citing commercial performance, and it has not flown to Tanzania since. The new service does not go back to Dar es Salaam. It goes to Kilimanjaro, in the north of the country, and to Zanzibar, off the coast.

On the radar

The radar on my desk labels every aircraft with its type, and BA 777s are regular visitors. In August one crossed the screen as BAW264, a 777-200 at 12,525 feet; earlier this month a 777-300ER, G-STBI, went over as BAW21B at 32,000 feet. Neither of them is the aircraft that will fly to Tanzania, but it will be the same type, and a 777 label on the screen will mean a little more once you know what some of them get up to.

Sources