Being involved with another potential SHL project this is not good news . Having been aware of the Comair issues from the beginning I am surprised it has taken so long to hit the main stream press.
Sadly it does seem a case of statistics outweighing the bloody obvious that you can never easily (and therefore safely) operate large jet transports into short airfields on islands because , especially with oceanic islands you get very capricious winds in terms of speed , direction and changes of both. While it does look like the 02 approach is more benign the 73 -8 has abit of a history when it comes to running off the far end. I am sure the Comair people didnt take their decisions lightly and S Africans are not feint hearted folk either, and concluded that it is too much of a risk to operate scheduled services in sucha situation. The problem is of course that because the ship is being decommisioned any aircraft serving SHL has to be a reasonable size so anything much smaller rthan a 73/A32 type cannot met the freight requirments.
No doubt the mighty 757 could do it all easily but not many of them around these days and passenger wise at least an overkill anyway.
I feel really sorry for the islanders who didnt get dealt the best hand in life born/living there and this must come as a terrible shock to them