On July 26, 1971, the constituent shareholders' general assembly of Cameroon Airlines met in Yaoundé. The company was born with a capital of 1.5 billion CFA francs, split between the Cameroonian state and Air France, which then held a 25% stake. Fifty-five years later, its successor Camair-Co has still not found the financial stability its founders hoped for.
The beginnings were modest but swift: the first commercial flights between Douala and Yaoundé started on November 1, 1971, with two Boeing 737-200s. International routes followed almost immediately, to Rome and then Paris, operated with a Boeing 707 bought from Air France. The fleet then grew with 747s, 757s and 767s, eventually covering Africa, Europe and the Middle East.
This expansion came to an abrupt halt starting in the 1990s. Mounting debt and increasingly criticized management eventually brought the company down: Cameroon Airlines was placed into court-ordered liquidation in June 2008, taking with it thousands of jobs and decades of institutional memory.
A replacement had, however, already been planned. By presidential decree No. 2006/293 of September 11, 2006, Paul Biya created Cameroon Airlines Corporation — Camair-Co — with the Cameroonian state as sole shareholder. Even so, it would take nearly five years before the new company got its first commercial flight off the ground, on March 28, 2011, on the Douala-Yaoundé-Paris route.
Since then, Camair-Co has struggled to win over customers. Flight cancellations without notice, repeated delays, lost baggage and aging aircraft have, over the years, fed persistent distrust among part of the Cameroonian public toward its national carrier. Its European routes were even suspended in 2016, before being partially restored.
By mid-2025, the airline was operating a reduced fleet of six aircraft: two Boeing 737-700s, two Bombardier Dash 8-Q400s and two Xi'an MA60s. It has never turned a profit since its creation and remains weighed down by debt, with no recovery timetable made public to date.
