Johannesburg, Cape Town, the safari strips, and a price on every single leg
Board figures from September 2026. The list further down is live.
South Africa is the only country on this site where every upcoming empty leg carries a published price: 42 of 42. The legs come from Luxaviation's South African operation, which lists a figure on each one. 23 of the 42 fly inside the country, 33 leave a South African airport and 32 arrive at one.
Johannesburg is on 27 legs and Cape Town on 21, and the corridor between them, Cape Town to Johannesburg, is the most repeated in the country at four each way. Then it gets interesting: Port Elizabeth to Cape Town four, Johannesburg to the Limpopo Valley three, Johannesburg to Maun in Botswana three, and single legs to Tswalo, Hoedspruit, Vilanculo and Plettenberg Bay. This is a safari board as much as a business one.
That shows in the fleet. The Pilatus PC-12 NGX is on 15 legs and the King Air 260 and B200 on 13 between them, turboprops that can use a lodge strip, with a Challenger 350 on three for the Cape Town run. Across the 33 legs priced in rand the median aircraft is 87,500 and the median seat 10,843. Six legs are labelled in US dollars as the operator listed them, median 64,750. We have recorded 107 legs touching South Africa since the end of July.
Upcoming legs touching each South African airport. The linked ones have their own page with the live list and everything we have recorded there.
The most repeated city pairs touching South Africa, with the number of upcoming legs on each. Direction matters: an empty leg is one way and there is no return.
| Aircraft, as the operator names it | Legs |
|---|---|
| Pilatus PC-12 NGX | 15 |
| Beechcraft King Air 260 | 7 |
| Beechcraft King Air B200 | 6 |
| Bombardier Challenger 350 | 3 |
| Bombardier Challenger 601 | 2 |
| Nextant 400XT | 2 |
Operators write the type their own way, so the same aircraft can appear under two names. We show what they wrote.
Median of the operator's published price, and that price divided by the seats the operator listed, on upcoming legs touching South Africa that carry both. Only currencies with at least three such legs.
| Currency | Legs | Aircraft | Per seat |
|---|---|---|---|
| ZAR | 33 | 87,500 | 10,843 |
| USD | 6 | 64,750 | 8,094 |
Per seat is a division, not a fare: the operator sells the aircraft. How that works across the whole board is in how much an empty leg private jet costs.
Read from our listings when you open the page, soonest first. Price is the operator's figure for the whole aircraft, or price on enquiry if they did not publish one.
| Departs | Route | Aircraft | Seats | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Loading the board. | ||||
A listing can be sold or withdrawn between our last check and your enquiry. Set an alert on a route and you hear first.
An empty leg is a flight a charter operator has to make anyway, to position an aircraft for a booking or to bring it home afterwards, sold at a discount because the alternative is flying it empty. The operator sets the route, the date and the aircraft. You fit into a flight that already exists, and it is one way: there is no return leg and no such thing as a return seat.
Everything on this page comes from South African legs that operators published on their own websites. We read those sites several times a day and record each leg exactly as listed, route, date, aircraft, seats and the operator's own price where they gave one. We do not read brokers, we take no commission and enquiries go straight to the operator. A leg counts for South Africa when either end resolves to a South African airport, first by the airport code the operator gave and then by the city name, so a leg written as an airport name still lands in the right country.
The written figures above are a snapshot from September 2026 and are restated, not quietly edited, when we rerun them. The live list is the board as it stands now.
All of them. Every one of the 42 upcoming empty legs touching South Africa on our board carries a published price, 33 in rand and 6 labelled in US dollars as the operator listed them.
Across the 33 upcoming South African legs priced in rand, the median published price is 87,500 rand for the whole aircraft, 10,843 rand a seat divided by the listed seats. The Cape Town to Johannesburg corridor is the most repeated in the country.
The board shows legs to the Limpopo Valley, Maun, Tswalo, Hoedspruit and Vilanculo, mostly on a Pilatus PC-12 or a King Air that can use a lodge airstrip. They come and go quickly, which is what the route alert is for.