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Travel tech: Secrets of the CT-Joburg flight
It is Africa’s busiest air route, but the traffic between South Africa’s biggest cities is still far from its glory days, writes ARTHUR GOLDSTUCK.
Once upon a flight time, the Cape Town to Johannesburg route was the 10th busiest in the world.
That was in 2012, when an Amadeus analysis counted 4.4-million passengers between the two cities. It was the only African route in the top 10 and one of only three outside Asia, alongside Rio de Janeiro–São Paulo and Melbourne–Sydney.
It has since disappeared from the global ranking. The International Air Transport Association’s World Air Transport Statistics counted 3.4-million passengers between Cape Town International and OR Tambo International in 2025, down by a quarter, yet still busy enough to retain first place in Africa.
“There are currently about 54 flights a day serving the route,” says Linden Birns, managing director of aviation consultancy Plane Talking. “FlySafair is the dominant carrier (on all major domestic routes) in terms of capacity and frequency. Airlink, Lift, Cemair and SAA account for the balance.”
His schedule research puts the route from Cape Town International to OR Tambo International Airport at about 301 one-way flights a week in each direction, with another 100 or so between Cape Town and Lanseria. FlySafair now accounts for 67% of South African domestic seat capacity and operates the only Cape Town–Lanseria services.
The passenger count comes from IATA’s World Air Transport Statistics, built on direct airline reporting.
It puts three other local routes in Africa’s top five: Durban–OR Tambo, Cape Town–Durban and Cape Town–Lanseria. Abuja–Lagos is the only top-five pairing outside South Africa.
Adding the Cape Town-Lanseria and Cape Town OR Tambo numbers would push the overall route back over 4-million, but not by enough to reclaim a top 10 ranking. The world has moved on, literally.
Tenth place globally last year was shared by Mumbai–Delhi and Beijing–Shanghai, each with about 5.5-million passengers. The world leader, Jeju–Seoul Gimpo in South Korea, carried 13.3-million. In 2012, its total had been 10.1-million.
Cape Town–Johannesburg also enjoyed a very different airline industry in 2012. SAA alone supplied 40% of South Africa’s domestic seat capacity, and its low-cost subsidiary Mango added another 10%.
Comair provided another large block of capacity through its British Airways franchise and kulula.com. The low-cost airline 1time was also operating when 2012 began, adding yet another budget option.
SAA’s financial crisis all but eliminated its role. It entered business rescue in December 2019, stopped commercial services during the pandemic and returned to the skies in September 2021 a shadow of its former fleet. Mango stopped flying in 2021. Comair collapsed the following year, removing British Airways domestic flights and kulula.com at the same time.
Airports Company South Africa later blamed capacity constraints and higher fares for a slow domestic recovery, but that was clearly only half the story, as it was left to FlySafair, Airlink, Lift, CemAir and the smaller SAA to restore the flight path.
The 3.4-million passengers still work out at more than 9,300 a day between Cape Town International and OR Tambo, before Lanseria traffic is included. Lanseria adds another twist, says Birns: “The fastest-growing route in Africa in 2025 was Durban – Johannesburg Lanseria with 430,000 passengers, representing 24.8% year-on-year growth from 2024.”
The mix of airlines covering all these routes makes for a fascinating dynamic: FlySafair’s Boeing 737s and Lift’s Airbus A320s carry large blocks of passengers, while Airlink’s Embraer fleet and CemAir’s regional jets allow smaller allocations of seats. SAA mainly uses Airbus A320s.
The mix gives airlines different tools for matching aircraft size to demand. On a route with departures throughout the day, that can mean a missed flight is rarely a disaster. Flying from Johannesburg to Polokwane on a 30-seater means that missing one of only two morning departures can result in a long wait for the only other flight of the day.
Rebooking a flight from Johannesburg to Cape Town, on the other hand, can result in the happy misfortune of choosing the occasional moment SAA puts an Airbus A330-300 onto the route: the widebody has to move between Johannesburg and Cape Town for the airline’s twice-weekly São Paulo service. The necessary aircraft movement becomes a domestic flight with seats for sale, giving startled passengers a long-haul cabin on a two-hour journey.
* Arthur Goldstuck is CEO of World Wide Worx, editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za, Editor of GadgetWIngs, and author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI – The African Edge”.
