Few African governments have built infrastructure on the scale of Angola’s new airport. Dr António Agostinho Neto International Airport (AIAAN) is roughly100 times the size of Lunada’s old airport, boasting an annual passenger capacity of 15 million, enough to rival Johannesburg – at least on paper.
The nearly $4 billion project was meant to make the capital city an enviable crossroads for regional air travel. Reality has been less generous: the airport carried only 756,000 passengers in 2025, representing about 5% of its capacity.
Earlier this month, Turkish Airlines, which flies to more countries than any other carrier in the world, permanently dropped Luanda along with four other African cities. Its departure was the latest in a series of retreats by international airlines from the gleaming new terminal.
Angola’s bet was a familiar one; build the infrastructure and the traffic will follow. Nearly three years after the airport’s ribbons were cut, they have not.
Luanda traded up but the numbers have not caught up
Before AIAAN, Quatro de Fevereiro International Airport was the main gateway into Angola’s oil-rich capital. But as Luanda expanded and passenger traffic surged, the airport increasingly struggled to keep pace. A $7 million post-war renovation had improved some facilities, but the terminals remained cramped, infrastructure was ageing and congestion was becoming more frequent. Its city-centre location also left little room to add capacity.
Stuck with a legacy airport bursting at its seams, the government began planning a replacement in 2004. Two years later, it selected a site about 40km from the capital, covering nearly three times the area of Quatro de Fevereiro.
The plan was not simply to replace an outdated airport. Angola wanted an aviation hub capable of handling five times as many passengers and four times as much freight, while helping to open up a city whose growth had long outstripped its infrastructure.
The scale of the project reflected a bigger bet. Angola had accumulated substantial oil wealth and was looking to diversify beyond crude and strengthen Luanda’s position as a regional centre for trade, business and travel.
The new airport was designed to support that strategy, with a rail connection to the capital and capacity for airlines and passenger volumes comparable to those of leading aviation hubs. After nearly two decades, AIAAN opened in 2023, making it the largest airport complex built by a Chinese company outside China.
It is estimated to have cost the Angolan government about $3.8 billion.
Operations were phased in, with cargo services coming first, followed by domestic flights in 2024. International flights took off for the first time last year, but it was not until March 2026 that full transfer of services from the old Quatro de Fevereiro airport was completed. In that time, one major airline had abandoned the route, with three others scaling back significantly.
Liberalisation reforms have done little to stem the exits. Turkish Airlines joined the list in September, removing Luanda from its network after what it had described as a temporary suspension of operations in April. Nonetheless, nine carriers continue to serve the capital city, yet passenger traffic remains thin.
With less than 1 million passengers passing through in 2025, AIAAN is still a long way from establishing itself as a major regional hub.
“The central issue is not simply the size of the airport,” Hailegebrel Tadese, an aviation connectivity strategist, told Businessfront. “The main problem is that the infrastructure has developed faster than the airline network, connecting traffic and the commercial ecosystem required to use it at scale.”
The connectivity gap
A modern terminal can make flying easier. It cannot, by itself, create a network. Tadese says connectivity remains one of AIAAN’s biggest constraints. Passengers using a regional gateway expect a broad choice of destinations, frequent services and connections that allow them to move through the network without lengthy detours.
Luanda has yet to develop that web of routes.
A review of scheduled services in the third week of October by Businessfront illustrates the gap. During the period, there were no direct flights from Luanda to several African capitals in the wider Southern African Development Community (SADC) region. Travellers heading to those cities would instead have to change planes elsewhere, with layovers ranging from about one to nine hours depending on the route, airline and fare.
The result is longer journeys, fewer choices and, in some cases, higher travel costs; for airlines, it makes Luanda harder to use as a connecting point.
The problem is not simply the number of airlines at AIAAN. It is how their routes fit together. “Infrastructure is the platform; the airline network is what activates the platform,” Tadese says.
The International Air Transport Association makes a similar point from the other direction. Its research finds that stronger air connectivity can improve access to markets, investment and skilled labour, while generating wider economic benefits through tourism, trade and other activity.
For Luanda, the challenge is therefore less about adding more terminal space than building the network capable of filling it. Tadese says TAAG remains central to that effort, alongside codeshare and interline agreements that can extend the reach of the national carrier without requiring it to operate every route itself.
TAAG does not need to carry every passenger itself, he said, but needs a network strategy that links Angola’s domestic and regional markets to international destinations while using partner airlines to extend Luanda’s reach.
“The development of partnerships and new international links should therefore be viewed as part of a longer network-building process,” Tadese said.
There are signs that some of that supporting infrastructure is taking shape. In October 2025, TAAG, SGA and Menzies Aviation agreed to establish Menzies Aviation Angola, a ground-handling, cargo and airport-services business intended to support the growth of AIAAN. Menzies had already established a joint venture with SGA in 2024 to provide cargo and lounge services in Luanda.
The airport’s temporary operator expects traffic to rise as the transition to AIAAN gathers pace. Vissolela Chivunda, ATO’s director of planning and quality, expects the airport to handle about 4 million passengers by the end of year, as Luanda’s airport system recovers towards pre-pandemic traffic levels.
With nearly 40 million people and one of sub-Saharan Africa’s larger economies, Angola has a sizeable domestic market and an economic base that could support a larger network.
But Luanda is not building its hub in isolation. It is competing for connecting passengers with established gateways across Africa and the Middle East, where airlines already offer dense networks of destinations, frequencies and onward connections. Building traffic at AIAAN will therefore require not only more flights, but enough connectivity to make Luanda a viable alternative for passengers.
Trapped profits
Luanda’s grand plan for its new airport also faces a dollar problem.
As of the end of October 2025, about $81 million in international airline revenues was trapped in Angola, according to IATA, making it the fifth-largest backlog in the world. Foreign operators earn much of their revenue in kwanza but need dollars to pay for fuel, aircraft leases, maintenance and other costs. Delays in converting and repatriating those earnings expose carriers to exchange-rate losses and disrupt their cash flow.
Angola’s foreign-exchange crisis has been compounded by volatility in oil prices and persistent distortions between official and parallel-market exchange rates.
Domestic carriers are not spared . With most aircraft parts and components imported, airlines are exposed to higher costs for maintaining and operating their fleets.
In 2025, the national carrier recorded a net loss of 133 billion kwanzas ($144.6 million) as expenses continued to outpace revenue.
Authorities acknowledge the strain on the industry. In May 2026, Angola’s central bank said it had sold more than $105 million in foreign currency to airlines since the start of the year to clear outstanding sector payments. Almost $94.5 million of the sales came in April alone. The intervention aimed at keeping airline operations running and protecting international connectivity amid rising aviation costs and weak credit access.
It is against backdrop that AIAAN is trying to build a regional hub.
Airlines go where the numbers work
Angola is not alone in having more airport than traffic. Across Africa, governments are opening large new terminals and expanding existing ones yet international carriers remain cautious about adding routes. Africa accounts for nearly 18% of the world’s population, yet continent still share of global air traffic remains below 3%
Waheedah Lawal, an airport economics expert, says airlines go where the numbers work.
“They go where passenger demand is proven, where costs are manageable and where the data gives them enough confidence to commit,” Lawal wrote in a recent analysis for the International Airport Review.
Those calculations can work against new regional gateways. Airlines need evidence that enough passengers will fill seats before committing aircraft and crews to a route, while high operating costs can make thin routes difficult to sustain.
Regulation further compounds the problem. The Single African Air Transport Market was intended to open skies across the continent, but implementation has been uneven, leaving passengers on some intra-African routes with no choice but to connect through Europe or the Middle East.
The infrastructure is there. The commercial case for filling it still has to be built.
What would turn Luanda around?
AIAAN is still in a transition period, with TAAG’s move to the new airport only beginning to reshape its traffic base. Its performance after less than three years may say little about its full long-term potential. A more meaningful test will be whether passenger growth, airline capacity and connections develop together.
Tadese notes that getting there will require more than persuading airlines to add new routes. He argues that Luanda needs a coordinated network-development strategy anchored in a strong national carrier and strategic airline partnerships.
In practical terms, that means building traffic around commercially viable regional routes first, connecting underserved city pairs and using proven passenger flows to support longer-haul services.
Luanda has a geographic opportunity, sitting between Southern and Central Africa with potential links to West Africa, Europe and selected markets in the Americas.
But geography alone will not create a hub. Until AIAAN can make economic sense to airlines, its vast capacity may continue to struggle to become an asset.
