Expect to fight for flights in the coming months: report

South Africa’s airlines are still struggling to return to pre-Covid levels of operations – and as new stresses like the jet fuel rationing at Cape Town International Airport take hold – flights over the next few months will remain limited, putting pressure on seat capacity for popular routes.

Speaking to the Sunday Times, FlySafair chief marketing officer Kirby Gordon said that before Covid hit, South Africa’s local airlines were pushing around 1.5 million seats a month. During Covid, this dropped to virtually nothing and then recovered to 1.2 million as the industry opened up again.

However, the liquidation of Comair saw the number of seats plummet to 900,000, he said.

South Africa’s domestic air travel has been in an uproar since Comair, the parent company of both British Airways in South Africa and Kulula, fell into business rescue and was subsequently liquidated.

The liquidation resulted in South Africa’s overall flight capacity being almost halved, with 40% taken offline. Gordon said the airline market lost approximately 9,000 seats a week.

Out of the country’s eight domestic airlines that were in operation pre-Covid-19, only four remain: FlySafair, Lift, CemAir and Airlink. Other airlines – SA Express, Kulula, British Airways and Mango – have all been grounded or liquidated, taking significant capacity out of the skies.

In recent weeks, however, Gordan said seat numbers have again returned to 1.2 million as the remaining airlines scurried to make up for the shortfall. The Comair gap has essentially been plugged, he said.

However, flight space remains under pressure and not yet at pre-Covid levels.

The FlySafair executive said that the coming months are high-traffic months, and a shortage of seats is likely due to demand for flights recovering much faster than airlines’ capacity to meet them.

Local airlines still in operation have all announced plans to boost seat numbers and bolster their fleets, but this will take time. FlySafair expects to put two new aircraft into operation before the end of the year, with more to come in 2023.

Fuel problems

On top of the realities of supply and demand, airlines are also under pressure from issues surrounding jet fuel.

The first major impact is from the rising cost of jet fuel, which has more than doubled in the last year, affecting overheads. More recently, however, a shortage of jet fuel at Cape Town International Airport has forced the Airports Company South Africa (ACSA) to ration stocks.

This affects every airline operating out of the airport. Cape Town International was due to receive a supply of fuel sometime in ‘early October’, but ACSA was notified that this delivery would be delayed.

ACSA issued a warning to passengers on Saturday, saying that flights could be disrupted. All passengers have been urged to keep up to date with airlines on the status of their flights.

The fuel shortage, however, will also have a direct impact on flights in and out of the airport, including reduced passenger loads, putting further stress on supply.

“ACSA has been working closely with airlines to reduce uplift out of Cape Town, and due to the added risks, has had to introduce further restrictions on fuel uplift to conserve fuel stocks until a new consignment of jet fuel arrives.”

ACSA said it would continue to work with airlines to limit the impact on flight operations, which includes reducing passenger loads; however, based on the current risk assessment report, airlines have been requested to conduct technical stops to uplift fuel at alternative airports.

AASA said this comes at a time when the industry is already under immense pressure due to operational and cost issues.

“These restrictions are now likely to result in disruptions to airline schedules and possibly cancelled flights at a time when the industry and the economy can ill afford it,” it said.

Read: ACSA warns of possible flight disruptions over jet fuel shortages