King Shaka International Airport

King Shaka International Airport at La Mercy, 35 km north of Durban, replaced the legacy Louis Botha Airport in May 2010 on a newly built greenfield site north of the city — a rare case of a full-replacement international airport construction in the 21st century. The 3,700 m (12,139 ft) asphalt runway makes it one of only three airports in South Africa capable of unrestricted Code F (A380) operations, alongside Johannesburg OR Tambo and Cape Town. Throughput of roughly 6M passengers annually, combined with that widebody capacity, secures DUR's place well inside the 534 largest. Traffic is dominated by the domestic trunk network: about 12 airlines operate 23 routes to 13 destinations (2026). FlySafair, Airlink, South African Airways, Lift, and CemAir run the primary schedule to Johannesburg (OR Tambo and Lanseria), Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, and East London. International service is deliberately narrower than at the two larger South African hubs — Emirates (Dubai), Qatar Airways (Doha), Turkish Airlines (Istanbul), Airlink regional, and seasonal charter traffic — reflecting KwaZulu-Natal's leisure-heavy demand profile, anchored by the province's beaches and the Drakensberg hinterland. King Shaka is the only South African airport with an integrated Dube TradePort — a 2,000-hectare special economic zone with air cargo, perishables, and pharmaceutical-grade logistics facilities directly adjoining the runway. That freight footprint, plus the airport's role as the Indian Ocean-facing widebody alternate for both OR Tambo and Cape Town, gives it operational weight beyond its passenger counts. ACSA, the state airport operator, has positioned DUR as South Africa's secondary long-haul gateway for Middle East and Asian traffic.