A Covid-19 Monitor surveys the empty check-in counters at Cape Town International Airport.
CAPE TOWN AIRPORT Coping with Covid-19
WORDS: MIKE RABEC Normally approximately 11 million passengers per year transit through Cape Town International Airport, making it the third largest in Africa. From having processed around 30,000 passengers each day, the airport has been brought to an almost complete standstill.
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N 23 March South Africa introduced lockdown regulations that grounded almost all aviation activity. After an initial total shutdown, a trickle of movement began when the airlines were permitted to operate repatriation flights to enable foreign residents stranded in South Africa to get home.
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FlightCom Magazine
Visiting the airport under the lockdown is an eerie experience. The international departure and arrival halls are deserted, with row after row of check-in counters standing empty. Prior to the lockdown restrictions, the airport was handling as many as 40,000 passengers and 20,000 items of baggage in a day. Uplift of JetA1 dropped from 2.3 million litres per day to almost zero during the Level 5 and 4 lockdown period.
The restrictions have had a calamitous effect on the airport’s revenue. To find out how the airport is coping with the Covid-19 crisis, we spoke to Deon Cloete, Cape Town International Airport’s General Manager. Cloete says the Airports Company of South Africa (ACSA) used the past two to three months for developing and implementing new procedures and protocols to minimise the risk to passengers in anticipation of a slow return to flying in Quarter 4 later this year. “The new protocols will require screening for all passengers – on both domestic and international routes. We have developed these new end-to-end procedures in close collaboration with key industry players i.e. non-ACSA airports such as Lanseria, local and international airlines, government and regulatory bodies. Suffice to say there has been a lot of learning with regular updates and tweaking happening along the way. We also leaned heavily on best practices recommended by the likes of IATA, ICAO and ACI.” While it is still early days we are confident that the new procedures and systems have created the right spaces for safe passenger processing and facilitation. We will keep a beady eye on innovation and
