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IN THE SPOTLIGHT: AIRPORTS DEVELOPMENT PLAN STILL A WORK IN PROGRESS
- 30 April 2026
- In the Spotlight
- SA Legal Academy
In the absence of a covering notice or media statement, it is not clear why the Department of Transport gazetted its national airports development plan on 17 April 2026. Dated March 2024, the document appears to have been finalised.
According to the department’s annual performance plan (page 124), a draft version of the plan was expected to be submitted to Cabinet during the 2025/26 financial year for pre-public participation process approval. Most recently, however, a presentation document circulated at the 22 April 2026 meeting of the National Assembly's Transport Committee referred to an additional pre-Cabinet approval step in the process: consultations in the National Economic Development & Labour Council. Apparently, the document's submission to Cabinet is now scheduled for the 2027/28 financial year.
This does tend to suggest the document is a still awork in progress and should probably not have been published.
As things now stand, among other things its executive summary refers to a draft civil aviation policy that was released in May 2025 for public comment – as SA Legal Academy reported at the time.
The executive summary also states that, ‘for the next five years, a reactive process to applications for international, regional-international and national airports will be used within application window periods’. The intention is that this should ‘enable comparison between applications’, taking due cognisance of:
- airspace
- transport masterplans
- economic viability and sustainability
- security imperatives, and
- information from ‘other data-gathering systems’.
Meanwhile, with budget allocations in mind, provincial governments and local municipalities ‘may want to identify which ... airports in their jurisdictions cannot become commercially viable but are serving a particular public service and can be justified on a socio-economic basis’.
The executive summary ends with a long list of ‘initiatives’, the implementation of which will require the department to ‘work closely with other airport role players’.
Should there be any further developments, SA Legal Academy will keep readers informed.
- gazetted plan
- 2025/26 annual performance plan
- presentation document
- May 2025 SA Legal Academy report on civil aviation policy
Published by SA Legal Academy Policy Watch
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