OAG’s September schedule file puts Cairo International at 1.79 million seats, up 11.2 percent on a year earlier, the largest airport total in Africa. Addis Ababa is second on 1.19 million, Johannesburg third on 1.16 million. Casablanca has 0.73 million, Nairobi 0.52 million. Egypt as a country market is first on the continent at 3.1 million seats. EgyptAir is the third-largest airline by African seats this month. Air Cairo is ninth. Those numbers are scheduled supply. Cairo Airport Company did say August handled more than 3.13 million passengers and 22,053 movements, up 9 and 11 percent. That is throughput. It is still not a transfer score.
The mix behind the 1.79 million is not a single story. Cairo is a home market where tourism, Gulf and European leisure, a large diaspora and EgyptAir’s own bank. It is also a geography play. When Gulf and Levantine airspace is a variable, a Nile-side connecting point looks useful on a map. That is not the same as Addis, which is built as a sixth-freedom factory with one carrier, one bank, Africa-to-everywhere as a product. Casablanca does the same job westward for Royal Air Maroc. Nairobi is a thinner version of the Addis model with a smaller fleet and a more fragile home market. Johannesburg is a southern origin that connects the continent to itself and to Sao Paulo and Perth more than it connects Accra to Beijing. Cairo’s risk is that a large origin-destination base can look like a hub while the connecting product is still a passenger walking between terminals with a bag that did not make the bank. A Fast Track fee argument in the same month as the OAG ranking is a small symptom of how the airport sells convenience. Terminal 4 is planned to take the campus toward 70 million passengers. Concrete is not a wave.
Dependable means published minimum connects that survive a late inbound, a baggage system that can turn a transfer without a day in the hall, and an airline that will hold a spoke for a trunk. Addis has practised that for years with one culture and one ops centre. Cairo has more metal and more foreign carriers on the ramp. That is an advantage only if EgyptAir’s bank, the ground handler and the ATC slot are timed as one product. Until OAG’s seat file is published next to a misconnect rate, a bag-delivery time and a winter irregularity record, Cairo is Africa’s largest schedule. It is not yet proven as Africa’s most dependable hub.