A new intercontinental air service could take-off from the multibillion-rand King Shaka International Airport north of Durban in the next year, adding to Emirates, currently the sole connection to an overseas destination. Comair, the largest local airline not owned by the government, is in talks with Dube Tradeport, which is the airport arm of the KwaZulu-Natal provincial government, about opening a direct, scheduled flight between King Shaka and London’s second largest international airport at Gatwick. “The talks are still very much in their infancy,” Stuart Cochrane, Comair’s executive manager for network development, told FTW. Comair, which currently has 23 daily flights into the new airport, is also investigating new regional flights from Durban to Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries, Cochrane added. But, again, this was not an immediate plan. “We have to assess the costs, the operational demands and the like, before we make this move. But there are very definitely opportunities in the region.” Meantime, the KZN provincial authorities seem to agree with what FTW readers have been telling us for some time. They are bemoaning the general under-utilisation of the Dube Tradeport at King Shaka, according to press reports quoting Frikkie Brooks, provincial co-operative governance head of department. He singled out, for example, a lack of agricultural exports passing through the airport. “The agricultural produce component of the Dube Tradeport is not doing well,” he said. “It is only a fraction that we use.” And he emphasised that there was a need for the agricultural sector in the province to start producing more crops for export.
