South Africa's airspace is vulnerable to cross-border smuggling because the country has no airborne radar system, according to defence analyst Helmut Heitman.
He says smugglers can evade being caught by ground-sited radar if they fly low enough and know exactly where the radar is.
''With the fixed radar you know where it is and you can work out a route to avoid being picked up on it. Over the years I have seen a couple of reports of aircraft flown undetected out of the country."
He cited the case of an aircraft that landed on a farm in Limpopo ''and when the police got there they found it full of cigarettes".
Heitman said even airborne radar could not offer complete airspace coverage but it made things very difficult for smugglers because, [unless there were a leak] they would not know where the radar would be at any specific time.
"I am sure that if we did our homework we would find that there is lot of stuff smuggled through South Africa by air that we do not know about," he said.
He said whether to spend money on airborne radar capability depended on how concerned one was about who gets in and out of the country.
He said Botswana and Zimbabwe had reasonable control of their airspace.
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