Addressing maintenance backlogs for commercial regional airports in Southern Africa

Abstract

Paper presented at the 28th Annual Southern African Transport Conference 6 - 9 July 2009 "Sustainable Transport", CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa.

Smaller regional airports in Southern Africa often have superfluous airside infrastructure and capacity. These airports are often included in the commercialised suite of airports due to their regional and national strategic importance. These airports also have associated regional developmental and economic importance. However, these airports normally have low passenger and aircraft movements. The latter is often smaller aircraft with runway lengths far in excess of the aircraft type needed with additional taxiways and apron areas provided for the aforementioned military functions in a gone by era. The result is that such smaller airports often have to operate as "loss leaders". Recent involvement in the preventative and innovative maintenance interventions at a number of this type and size of airport in South Africa, under the management of the Airports Company of South Africa (ACSA), created opportunity to transfer such knowledge to similar airports under the auspices of Namibia Airports Company (NAC). The obvious backlog of maintenance and rehabilitation needs of these airports in Namibia offered the opportunity to determine the actual level of service needed for such airports linked to actual aircraft movements and their projected trends. Innovative solutions developed in SA involved discarding and mothballing of superfluous ex-military facilities. An analysis on the budget provisions regarding the current facilities compared to the reality driven down-sized facilities were also done in order to provide indicators for the associated budget provision for such sustainable facilities. Throughout the ACSA airports were used as benchmark for measures of commercial success and asset preservation and utilisation.