Uganda Airlines is opening one of the shortest and most obvious gaps in its network. In the fourth quarter of 2026 the national carrier plans to launch Entebbe β Kigali, with the route filed to begin on 18 November 2026 using the Bombardier CRJ900.
Schedules show a single daily rotation, split across two flight-number pairs depending on the day. UR380 departs Entebbe at 04:00 and arrives in Kigali at 04:00 local time, with UR381 returning from Kigali at 04:45 to land at Entebbe at 06:45. On the remaining days the timings move into the morning, with UR382 leaving Entebbe at 08:15 for an 08:15 local arrival in Kigali and UR383 departing Kigali at 09:00 to reach Entebbe at 11:00.
The identical departure and arrival clocks on the outbound legs are a function of the time zones rather than an impossibly fast flight: Uganda runs on East Africa Time while Rwanda sits an hour behind on Central Africa Time. The block time is roughly an hour in each direction.
A regional jet for a regional market
The CRJ900 is well suited to the sector. The type is a slim regional jet with a distinctive T-tail and two engines mounted on the rear fuselage rather than under the wing, and its roughly 75-seat capacity is sized for exactly this kind of high-frequency, short-stage regional flying where a narrowbody would be too much aeroplane.
Uganda Airlines has operated the CRJ900 since relaunching operations, using it as the backbone of its regional network out of Entebbe while larger widebody equipment handles longer international sectors. Adding Kigali gives the fleet another short rotation that can be flown twice within a morning, improving daily utilisation on an asset that is otherwise idle between regional banks.
Filling in the East African map
Entebbe and Kigali are barely 400 kilometres apart, and the two cities sit at the centre of one of the busiest overland corridors in East Africa. Air links between them have historically been thin relative to the volume of business and government travel moving in both directions, leaving a large share of the market to road transport and to connections through other regional hubs.
For Uganda Airlines the addition is as much about network shape as it is about the point-to-point market. A morning arrival into Entebbe at 06:45 feeds the carrierβs onward departures, while the later rotation gives Kigali-based travellers a same-day return option. Both patterns let the airline sell Kigali as a feeder into its wider network rather than treating it purely as a standalone city pair.
The route is filed at one daily flight from launch. As always with a new regional sector, frequency will depend on how the market responds once the service is established, and the CRJ900βs modest capacity gives the airline room to build demand before committing larger aircraft.
Sources: AeroRoutes. Featured image: AI-generated by AviationShop. By Daniel Okafor.
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