Southern African Air Transport After Apartheid

Abstract

Aviation in Southern Africa was subject throughout the 1980s to increasingly intense political pressures. As ever, the cause was protests about apartheid. The severe blow that black African countries dealt to South African Airways (S.A.A.), the Republic's state-owned national airline, in the 1960s by withdrawing overflying rights was magnified by similar action from a wider spectrum of non-African governments. In the mid-1980s, Australia and the United States of America, for example, revoked S.A.A.'s landing rights, and forbad airlines registered in their countries from flying to South Africa. Other carriers, such as Air Canada, closed their offices and then terminated representation in South Africa.