CPT Cape Town

How deep the CPT board really is

The table above says where a courier can fly from CPT. This reads the same 34 destinations back for the questions a dispatcher asks second: how much of the board rests on one airline, how much of it runs less than daily, whether the return leg is as thick as the outbound, what the clock here does to a Gulf working day and which of the destinations shut at night, all of it computed on 2026-09-07 from AeroDataBox scheduled route statistics.

• 20of the 34 destinations are flown by one airline
• 10destinations run less than once a day
• 3destinations have four or more departures a day
• 47.1%of the destinations name South African Airlink, the largest presence here

Who holds the departures at CPT

25 airlines appear on the CPT board and they do not hold it evenly. South African Airlink is on 16 of the 34 destinations, 47.1 per cent of them, and on 7 of those it is the only airline flying the sector. The destinations it appears on carry 82.1 of the 115.3 departures a day this airport files, though other airlines fly some of the same sectors, so read that as reach rather than as a share of the aircraft.

The next largest presence is Safair on 9 destinations. 18 of the 25 airlines at CPT appear on a single destination each, which is the long tail every airport carries, and none of it is a rebooking option when the sector you need is the one that fell over.

An airport held this tightly is quick to book and slow to recover: with 16 of the 34 destinations on one airline, the second aircraft on a CPT sector is usually another South African Airlink aircraft, and when there is not one the desk is looking at another airport rather than another airline. No alternate airport within road reach is held for CPT, so that second look is a longer road leg or a different day.

How much of the CPT board is daily

Of the 34 destinations, 24 are flown at least once a day and 10 are not, 1 of them running once a week or less. The median destination on the CPT board is flown about once a day.

An average of 0.14 flights a day is the schedule statistic, and it is worth translating it before anything is promised to anybody: CPT to Zurich (ZRH) is about one a week, so a missed departure there is not a delay of hours, it is the next slot.

The five busiest destinations carry 76 of the 115.3 departures a day, 65.9 per cent of the whole board. More than half of everything that leaves CPT is aimed at those five places, so the depth on the board above is thinner than the destination count suggests, and a hand carry that is not going to one of them is planned around a single departure time.

Destination	Country	The only airline on it	Flights a week	km	Routing
Zurich ZRH	Switzerland	Edelweiss Air	1	9,110	plan this
Dar es Salaam DAR	Tanzania	Air Tanzania	3	3,681	the pair page
Newark EWR	the United States	United Airlines	3	12,592	plan this
Atlanta ATL	the United States	Delta Air Lines	4	13,090	plan this
Washington IAD	the United States	United Airlines	4	12,764	plan this
Maputo MPM	Mozambique	South African Airlink	5	1,614	plan this
Istanbul IST	Turkiye	Turkish Airlines	6	8,431	plan this

The seven destinations out of CPT where one airline holds the sector and files fewer than seven departures a week, with the weekly figure taken as the average daily rate multiplied by seven rather than as a fixed timetable.

The way back from CPT

The desk holds the return direction for 23 of the 34 destinations, and a courier plans the way back on those figures rather than on the outbound. On none of those 23 does the return run more than a quarter thinner than the outbound, so a turnaround through CPT is a question of hours rather than of whether an aircraft exists.

It runs the other way as well: São Paulo (GRU) files 1 a day back into CPT against 0.71 outbound, which is the shape that strands a courier at this end rather than at the far end.

The clock at CPT

CPT keeps Africa/Johannesburg time, two hours behind Dubai all year.

When it is 09:00 on a Dubai working morning it is 07:00 at CPT, so a nine to six day at each end overlaps for seven hours. That is wide enough to settle a customs question at CPT and still make a departure the same day.

The night at CPT

4 of the destinations from here carry a documented night restriction of their own, which is a departure time question at this end rather than an arrival problem at the other.

Into Amsterdam (AMS) the door shuts at 23:00 local, so the last departure from CPT that lands inside it leaves around 10:50, on a modelled block of 12h 10m. Into London (LHR) the door shuts at 23:30 local, so the last departure from CPT that lands inside it leaves around 12:20, on a modelled block of 12h 10m. Into Frankfurt-am-Main (FRA) the door shuts at 23:00 local, so the last departure from CPT that lands inside it leaves around 11:11, on a modelled block of 11h 49m. Those three departure times out of CPT are worked backwards from the published window with the block time model this site uses everywhere, 720 to 880 km an hour by sector length with thirty minutes on the ground, so they are arithmetic rather than a timetable and the desk checks the published departure before it promises the landing.

Where CPT turns up on the rest of this site

CPT carries two other pages on this site as well: the South Africa country desk, which sets out the customs practice, the working week and the road legs behind this airport and the CPT transit page for the connecting case, where a courier changes aircraft here rather than starting or finishing.

The site publishes 4 airport pair pages that start or end at CPT, each with the distance, the block time, the carriers on the sector and a door to door clock. The busiest are Cape Town to Jo'anna (JNB), Cape Town to Addis Ababa (ADD) and Cape Town to São Paulo (GRU).

Two of the 346 published hand carry lanes run through this airport: Cape Town to London and Dubai to Cape Town. A lane page is the commercial version of the board above, with the customs, the ground legs and the price at CPT written out.

One courier posting names CPT as the airport a courier here flies from: Cape Town.

To price a movement rather than read the board, the route calculator opens with CPT already set as the origin, and it works out the flying time, the distance and the delivery hour for any of the 34 destinations above.