South Africa is on day 4 of its lockdown that started on March 26. With the lockdown, many airlines have suspended flights until further notice.
According to Flightradar24’s real-time flight tracking website, South Africa is abiding by President Cyril Ramaphosa’s lockdown rules and travel bans for South Africans.
Flightradar24 is a global flight tracking service that provides you with real-time information about thousands of aircraft around the world.
Flightradar24, on its website, states that it tracks 180 000+ flights, from 1 200+ airlines, flying to or from 4 000+ airports around the world in real-time. South Africa may not have flights travelling to and from the country, but it’s travel as usual for other African destinations.
The map shows there were flights in the vicinity of Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania, Malawi and Kenya. Overall, it seems there were fewer flights in Africa compared to other parts of the globe like Asia and Europe.
Despite many airlines still operating, Flightradar24 saw an unprecedented decline in global air traffic.It said on its website the spread of Covid-19 and response by the aviation industry had resulted in an unprecedented decline in global air traffic.
“Commercial air traffic dropped in the third week of January, but made a slight recovery during February into the first week in March. As Covid-19 spread around the world and airlines reacted by halting flying and governments put travel restrictions in place, commercial air traffic has shrunk 41 percent below 2019 levels in the last two weeks of March.
“Commercial flights decreased 55 percent in the final week of March 2020 compared to 2019. We expect this trend to continue as airlines remove additional flights from their schedules.”