FlySafair has spent a decade turning two planes into the airline most South Africans actually fly. It launched in 2014 flying between Johannesburg and Cape Town, and today runs more than 30 jets and carries about 67% of the country's domestic passengers. This week it moved a big step closer to changing hands: on 13 July 2026 the Competition Commission recommended that the Competition Tribunal approve the sale of Safair Holdings, FlySafair's parent, to the infrastructure investor Harith. The recommendation came with a condition, and that condition is the part worth watching.
The catch is an airport
Harith is not an airline. It is an asset manager that finances infrastructure across sectors like energy, transport and healthcare, and it happens to own about 37.5% of Lanseria, the only privately owned international airport in the country. That is the snag. FlySafair's rivals also fly out of Lanseria, so a FlySafair owner with a hand in the airport could, in theory, tilt the field. The Commission's fix was to make both sides promise two things: wall off commercially sensitive information, and charge every airline using Lanseria fair, non-discriminatory terms.
Why sell in the first place
The deeper reason for the deal is a rulebook. FlySafair's Dublin-based parent, ASL Aviation, effectively owns 74.86% of the airline, which trips South Africa's requirement that local carriers be at least 75% locally owned. In early 2025 the licensing council ruled the structure breached that rule and gave FlySafair a year to fix it or risk losing its licence, a ruling that had followed a complaint from rival airline Lift. Selling to Harith, a South African investor partly owned by the state's Public Investment Corporation, does exactly that: it swaps an Irish shareholder for a South African one without pulling a single aircraft from the sky. Harith knows the territory, too, having chased South African Airways until that bid fell apart in 2024 and it turned to FlySafair instead.
What it's worth, and what comes next
Nobody has put an official price on the table, as private-equity deals rarely do. The clue comes from Harith chair Tshepo Mahloele, who has said FlySafair will make up about 15% of Harith's portfolio, pointing to an estimated figure above R8-billion. He has also told Bloomberg he expects the deal to close by the last quarter of 2026. There is a public-money angle as well: the Public Investment Corporation owns 30% of Harith's asset-management arm, so it stands to earn from the fees the deal throws off. For now the Competition Tribunal holds the final decision, and FlySafair says nothing changes for passengers or staff while it waits.
The real test comes later, when the airport's part-owner is flying its own planes out of Lanseria and everyone else is left trusting that fair still means fair.
