Airports Company SA (Acsa) is urging passengers not to be concerned as a short supply of jet fuel isn’t expected to impact flights.
It said that contingency plans had been put in place to prevent Cape Town International Airport from running out of fuel.
A vessel carrying its refill shipment has been delayed at sea due to adverse weather conditions and the airport currently had four days of jet fuel stock available.
The company has issued a notice requesting airlines to reduce fuel intake at Cape Town International Airport.
The airport’s Mark Maclean: “Unfortunately, we were informed that there’s a vessel that is supposed to be delivering jet fuel and this vessel is delayed by a week because of bad weather at sea and is now only due to arrive on Saturday. In the meantime, our goal of course is to mitigate the risk of a fuel stockout at the airport and to prevent operation disruption to the airlines.”
Maclean said that to achieve this, two measures had been put in place.
“We’ve issues a notice to airmen, who’ve reduced uptake of fuel, which means that they carry more fuel into Cape Town and take less fuel out of Cape Town and the second action is to engage the fuel suppliers to bring additional jet fuel into the airport, so we’ve been working on that for the last week.”
He said that at this stage, while he could not provide any guarantees, he’d received no notification of any cancelled or disrupted flights and airlines and fuel suppliers had been asked to work together to prevent this.
“Even though we carry a bulk storgae of fuel, there’s different quantities of fuel that’s allocated to diferent fuel suppliers and those fuel suppliers have individual agreements with airlines, so we are concerned that there may be some suppliers that are running lower on stocks than others and we are asking them to work together and of course to secure alternative supply of jet fuel.”