Airports and airside infrastructure

2.  Airports and airside infrastructure

Airports—overview

This study had initially been designed to examine airports with more than 60,000 passengers annually. But, due to the nature of travel in Africa, some elements of this report will span all airports that receive traffic on published schedules.

With the use of various databases, it can be determined that there are at least 2,900 airports in Africa.¹² The number of these airports receiving scheduled services fluctuates, in part due to seasonality. In November 2007, an estimated 280 airports throughout Africa received scheduled services (see figure 2.1). The variance of airports with scheduled traffic within a year is so great, however, that if one adds up all airports that have had any scheduled service at any point throughout the year, the totals are significantly higher than the number given at any point in time.

Table 2.1 Airports receiving scheduled services in Africa for a given year. The annual number is higher than the snapshot number at any given point in time, such as the one for November 2007 in figure 2.1.

Region 2001 2004 2007 North Africa 77 73 70 Sub-Saharan Africa 318 276 261 Total 395 349 331

Source: Analysis on data provided by Seabury ADG .

There has been a considerable overall downward trend in the number of airports with scheduled service. With the exception of the Banjul Accord Group (BAG) of countries (Ghana, Nigeria, Cape Verde, Gambia, Liberia, and Sierra Leone), drops in airports with scheduled service varied from 20 to 40 percent between 2001 and 2007. (See table 2.2 for annual totals of airports with scheduled service. Figure 2.2 shows the number of airports receiving scheduled service each given month—the totals are less than the annual count, as explained above.)

Nearly all of the airports with service in November 2007, the last data snapshot in this report, have at least one paved major runway. Surprisingly, only a dozen or so airstrips are not paved, and most of these are in countries that are having or recently have had military conflicts. One exception is the Republic of Tanzania, which has five airports with scheduled service and with alternatively surfaced runways. (The World Bank is currently involved in projects resurfacing these runways.)

Figure 2.1 Airports receiving scheduled service in November 2007, sized by their seats per week

Source: Analysis on data provided by Seabury ADG.

Figure 2.2 Airports with scheduled service within Africa

Source: Analysis on data provided by Seabury ADG. Note: The trend overall is clearly downwards.

Many public resources exist on airside infrastructure. This is due to the nature of the information – in order to make airports accessible to air travel, the installations need to be listed and published, and thus appear in a country’s Aeronautical Information Publication (AIP) and in after-market publications widely distributed especially amongst pilots, such as Jeppenses. However, in reality a distinction needs to be made between the published installations, the installations that are actually operational, and those that have actually been installed and for various reasons never were included in the publication process. The majority of information for this report is based on publicly available information, so an accurate, quantitative assessment of the quality of installations cannot be made without on-site evaluations. For example, it is know anecdotally at the time of this writing that the instrument landing system at Maseru International Airport in Lesotho has become so unreliable that the schedule integrity of the only airline servicing the airport, South African Airlink Express, has been compromised. In other cases, modern GNSS approaches may have been designed and financed, yet for various reasons have not entered the publication process, and are therefore not in the public inventory of airside services and installations.

These measurements were not made by staff observation, but by examining the airports using commonly available satellite images. The basic criteria were the appearance of the runway and other obviously visible issues, such as serious security deficiencies shown by footpaths over the runway extending beyond the airport perimeter. The summary was made on those airports only with adequate resolution images – of 280 airports, 73 could not be evaluated due to image quality.

ILSs can be found in nearly all airports with an estimated capacity of 1 million seats or more, but drop off rapidly below this figure. In a large number of the smaller, older airports, non-directional beacon (NDB) systems, now very old and outdated, are still prevalent. This does not suggest that new investment is needed in ground-based navigation infrastructure—today satellite technology can easily replace many of the ground-based navigation systems at a much lower cost than the older systems incurred. But, this does suggest that in many cases either no plans have been made, or no funding obtained, for the replacement of increasingly obsolete technologies.