King Phalo Airport ELS / FAEL

Eastern Cape's second ACSA gateway (after Chief Dawid Stuurman/PLZ), handling 20-30 flights/day on domestic trunk and regional routes — Airlink, FlySafair and CemAir serve Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and Lanseria, with BidAir Cargo running freight. FY2025-26 traffic of 911,738 passengers (+9.8% y/y from 830,442 in FY2024-25) / 12,778 aircraft movements is ACSA's own reported figure (confirmed via Wikipedia's ACSA-sourced statistics); December 2025 peak-season traffic (~90,000 pax) was up from ~83,000 in December 2024 (confirmed via Daily Dispatch). Customs is available but the field is not a designated port of entry (no immigration post), so treat 'international' as limited/charter capability rather than scheduled service. A R450m ACSA terminal-modernisation project was confirmed via Daily Dispatch (18 Feb 2026): part of ACSA's R21.7bn nine-airport investment programme, start expected later in 2026, ~2-year build. ATNS reportedly ran a VOR-replacement project in late Apr 2026 that suspended the ELV VOR/DME and related approach aids for about a month; ELV VOR's existence is confirmed (114.5 MHz, on-field per SkyVector navaid data) but the specific outage claim could not be corroborated — treat as unverified, re-check a current NOTAM/AIP before ops planning. Lengths were also nudged to the primary-source values (1939/1584 vs the draft's 1937/1583), a ~1-2m difference immaterial to ops but now sourced to the primary AIP rather than a secondary aggregator. Coordinates: minor variance exists between sources — this record's value (-33.0356, 27.8259, per ourairports.com) sits about 0.3nm east of a tighter Wikipedia/airmate.aero/SkyVector cluster (~-33.0350, 27.8214); a centroid computed from the AIP's four published runway-threshold coordinates (~-33.0361, 27.8238) falls between the two and doesn't clearly resolve which is the true ARP, so the original value was retained pending access to the AIP's AD 2.2 ARP entry specifically (only AD 2.12-2.14 pages were retrievable). Elevation 435ft/133m confirmed by three independent sources (ourairports.com, airmate.aero, SkyVector); Wikipedia's 436ft appears to be a lone rounding outlier. Website URL casing corrected to match ACSA's live site (/airports/King-Phalo-airport). Ownership/shareholding structure (74.6% state / 20% PIC / 4.2% empowerment / 1.2% staff) is consistent with ACSA's own 'Our Legal Structure' disclosure (which names the same four shareholder categories) and other public reporting, though the primary source did not break out the exact 4.2%/1.2% split within the 5.4% balance for independent confirmation.3/2.6 sections) — carried forward from prior sourcing.