In a Moneyweb Midday podcast recorded on 20 August 2026, Linden Birns, a senior executive at the International Air Transport Association (IATA), warned that the global aviation market is flatlining, but Africa is still seeing more people board planes.
Birns said the slowdown is driven by weaker demand in Europe, North America and parts of Asia, where airlines are trimming capacity and postponing new routes. He contrasted that with a steady rise in African passenger traffic, which he attributed to a growing middle class, increased intra-regional trade and a surge in tourism to destinations such as Mauritius, Kenya and South Africa.
For a small-to-medium enterprise that relies on air freight, for example a Cape Town fruit exporter or a Johannesburg tech start-up that ships hardware abroad, the trend matters. More seats and cargo space on African routes can mean lower freight rates and more reliable schedules, especially when global carriers are pulling back.
Birns explained that IATA tracks airline performance through a metric called revenue passenger kilometres (RPK), which measures the number of paying passengers multiplied by the distance they travel. While RPK fell in the global market last quarter, African RPK continued to climb, according to the association’s latest data.
He also noted that many African airlines are modernising their fleets, replacing older aircraft with fuel-efficient models. This reduces operating costs and makes it easier for airlines to offer competitive fares, a factor that can help small businesses keep shipping costs down.
However, the picture is not without challenges. Birns mentioned that infrastructure bottlenecks at several airports, limited runway capacity, outdated terminal facilities and occasional power cuts, still constrain growth. He suggested that governments and private investors need to accelerate airport upgrades if the continent wants to sustain the current momentum.
From a broader economic perspective, the rise in air travel supports tourism-related jobs, boosts foreign exchange earnings and encourages foreign direct investment. For SMEs in the hospitality sector, higher visitor numbers translate into more bookings for hotels, restaurants and tour operators.
Birns’ comments come alongside other segments of the Moneyweb Midday podcast that tackled unrelated issues, such as South Africa’s unsolved crime crisis and the accessibility of sign language for Deaf citizens. While those topics do not directly affect the aviation discussion, they illustrate the range of challenges facing the South African economy.
In summary, the IATA executive’s assessment is that Africa’s aviation market is an outlier in a sluggish global environment. The claim remains a statement from the trade body until independently verified by a third-party data source.
The measures behind an aviation demand story
Revenue passenger kilometres describe demand, and on their own they are only half of the picture. The matching supply measure is available seat kilometres, the seats an airline offers multiplied by the distance they are flown. Dividing one by the other gives the load factor, the proportion of available seats actually sold, which is the number that determines whether flying a route makes money. Airlines operate on thin margins per passenger, so a route can be full of passengers and still lose money if the fares are too low, and can carry fewer passengers profitably if the yield, the average revenue per passenger kilometre, is high enough.
This matters when reading any claim that traffic is growing. Growth in passengers is not growth in profit, and a market can expand while the carriers serving it lose money, which has been a recurring pattern in aviation generally.
Why African aviation costs what it does
Several structural features push costs above the global average, and they are worth knowing because they set the limits on how quickly any growth trend can translate into cheaper freight or cheaper seats.
Aviation fuel is often more expensive than the international benchmark once distribution to individual airports is accounted for. Taxes and airport charges frequently make up a larger share of a ticket price than in larger markets, partly because airports with modest traffic still have to recover their fixed costs from fewer passengers. Route networks are thinner, which means smaller aircraft flying less often, and smaller aircraft carry a higher cost per seat. Access is also shaped by bilateral air service agreements between individual countries, which determine who may fly where and how often, so capacity on many routes is a negotiated outcome rather than a purely commercial one.
What it means for an exporter
The detail most relevant to a business shipping goods is that a large share of air freight travels in the hold of ordinary passenger aircraft rather than on dedicated freighters. Belly capacity is a by product of passenger schedules, which is why freight rates on a route tend to follow passenger demand, and why an exporter’s shipping costs can change because of a decision made about a route’s seat capacity rather than anything happening in cargo.
The practical implication is that route announcements are worth watching as freight news. A new or more frequent passenger service on a lane a business ships along usually means more capacity and better rates, and a suspended route can remove options with very little notice.
