South Africa’s biggest and busiest privately owned aerodrome, Lanseria International Airport, continues to expand and upgrade its facilities to meet rising demand for both domestic and international services. These increases embrace passenger numbers and the numbers of scheduled commercial airline flights, as well as business aviation operations and charter flights. Including the cost of the recently completed upgrade to its international terminal, by 2020 the airport will have spent some R200-million to R250-million on improving its facilities. But that will not mark the end of the programme, as another phase will commence in that year.

“It cost R25-million for the upgrade of the international terminal building,” says Lanseria International Airport CEO Rampa Rammopo. “We have upgraded the peak-hour capacity of the international terminal from 70 passengers an hour to 150 passengers an hour.”

Currently under way is the construction of a new control tower and a new fire station, which together will also cost about R25-million. Both the new facilities are being built on the south side of the airport. The new fire station is expected to be completed by the middle of October this year, while the control tower will be completed in the first quarter of 2017.

The next step will be the construction of a multistorey car park, which will take place under the airport’s master plan for the next two to three years. “Because of the increasing number of passengers coming through our terminals, we estimate that we’ll be at full [car parking] capacity by this time next year,” he reports. “We will increase the number of bays from 3 000 (excluding staff parking) to about 4 500 bays. We estimate that the new parkade will cost anything between R150-million and R200-million – the last estimates were done two years ago.”

Beyond that, the terminal building will be expanded. With the completion of the new control tower and fire station, the existing control tower and fire station will be demolished, allowing the expansion of the terminal building. “We’ll probably start with the expansion of the terminal building in 2020,” he states. “The terminal capacity is now three-and-a-half million passengers a year and we’re now operating at just under two-million passengers. Our growth predictions are that we will reach maximum capacity in three years. We’re also seeking to attract regional airlines – that’s why we upgraded our international terminal building.”

There is another important development, likely to happen within the next few years, which would also significantly increase the range of services that the airport could provide, but which would not be funded by the airport – an hotel. “We’ve been approached by some of the hotel companies, wanting to build a hotel facility within the airport precinct,” points out Rammopo. “We’ve got a piece of land that they’d rent from us and they’d construct and manage the facility themselves.”

The airport recently marked the start of scheduled services by low-cost carrier FlySafair. The airline, part of the Safair group, will fly between Lanseria and Cape Town and Lanseria and George. It becomes the third budget airline to operate regular Lanseria schedules, after Kulula (part of Comair) and Mango (part of the South African Airways group).

“We’re very excited about this relationship with FlySafair,” he affirms. “We started [scheduled commercial operations] with Kulula in 2006, with Mango coming on board in 2011. We hope FlySafair will add to our number of passengers and not cannibalise the existing operators. FlySafair believe they will bring in new customers and also hope to develop new routes with them – to the Eastern Cape, for example. We’re very excited that FlySafair has introduced a route to George and my understanding is that the numbers look good.”