Africa-Press – South-Africa. On Tuesday morning, flights to Cape Town could not land due to technical problems experienced at Cape Town International Airport.
Airports Company SA (ACSA) says flights were affected after a fibre network fault at the airport, which meant that the necessary instrument landing technology was not available to land planes in heavy fog, which hit Cape Town on Tuesday morning.
Just before 10:00, the fog lifted and flights could land, Acsa confirmed.
“These limitations on runway equipment and the consequential diversions are naturally as frustrating to us as they are to our customers. While we’ll do our best to limit inconvenience to customers, the implications for us also include the additional costs of landing at diversion airports and refuelling to get customers back to where they need to be,” says Kirby Gordon, spokesperson of FlySafair. “Effectively the operating costs of these flights triple, as we effectively do three flights to achieve one.”
A CemAir flight to Cape Town had to return to Johannesburg and the airline’s CEO Miles van der Molen said other flights were delayed until the weather improved in Cape Town. He also pointed to the huge additional cost this creates for airlines.
Airlink CEO Rodger Foster confirmed that several of its flights were delayed on Tuesday morning due to the fog at Cape Town and George. LIFT flights into Cape Town were also impacted, and at least one SAA flight had to return to Johannesburg due to not being able to land in Cape Town.
International flights were also reportedly impacted.
ACSA urged passengers to contact the airlines they are travelling on and check for regular updates on ACSA’s mobile app.
“We apologise to all our airport users and travellers for the inconvenience caused by this,” said ACSA.
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