Face to Face: Rodger Foster

To promnote electric propulsion Rolls Royce reached 387 mph with this electric racer.

working nights as hotel receptionists and of 20,000 hour Captains driving TLB back-actors and busses.

As a group, the greatest victims are Senior First Officers, aged around 40, who have 15 or more years of service, but who were stuck at First Officer due to the lack of SAA growth. As the airline industry recovers, these SFOs, who have mortgages and children in expensive schools, will have to compete against 28-yearold Captains with 1000 hours of command, who have a low cost of living and can therefore accept much lower salaries. Our young airline columnist, Dassie van der Westhuizen, qualified as a Airbus A320 pilot but has had to go back to being cabin crew.

We know that things will never be the same again, but what will the new normal be? Full-service airlines have traditionally relied on the fat profit margin from business class, yet the number of business travellers has been reduced by as much as half due to the widespread adoption of webinars and online conferencing, instead of face-to-face meetings.

SAA finally emerged from Business Rescue in June. There had been huge scepticism from commentators (me included) that SAA would ever find a ‘Strategic Equity Partner’. Yet in June 2021, the South African government seemed to have pulled a rabbit out of the hat when it announced that, “after extensive talks with potential investors, they selected the Takatso Consortium. The Consortium will own 51% of the airline, while the government maintains a 49% stake. The Consortium involves Harith General Partners and Global Airways”.

As a dowry, Pravin Gordhan, the Public Enterprises Minister, said that SAA will receive a R3.5 billion cash injection in the form of running costs from Harith. But now, five months later, they deal has still not been consummated and increasingly difficult questions are being asked about the true source of funding for the Taktso Consortium and the role of Gidon Novick as the CEO of the consortium with his Lift Airline. In November this year it seemed certain that Mango was to be sacrificed in favour of Lift with the loss of an important and by and large well-run domestic airline with 900 direct jobs.

The South African government is like the physics conundrum of an irresistible cannonball hitting an immovable post. The cannonball is

SAA pilots turned out to be almost unemployable in the charter market.

their commitment to notion that SAA can ever run profitably under government control – even at 49%. The immovable post is the sheer impossibility of the SA government being able to run anything successfully. It has destroyed all its state owned enterprises and the ANC cannot even pay its own salaries. The big issue is once again the ANC government's insistence – at all costs – for racial transformation of the pilot body. This is evidently an objective that has no limits when it comes to spending the public's hard-earned taxes.

The SA government seems oblivious to the enormous resentment against its airline amongst its voters. And like it or not, if pilots are promoted on the basis of race, rather than on skill or experience, the faith that passengers have in SAA’s safety will be irretrievably damaged. People will rather book on other airlines making the long term viability of SAA even more impossible.

The SAAF

In 2021 the South African Air Force continues to operate as an air force, but with the budget of an air wing. Our expert Defence columnist, Darren Olivier, reports that the SAAF is already cannibalising its Hawk Mk120s and Gripen fighters for spares. Thus is an once world class and proud air force brought to its knees.

The CAA

Pilots either hate the CAA or just ruefully shrug their shoulders and say, “This is Africa”. Thus, some accepted that it takes months to renew basic aircraft documentation. Others remember the good old days when you could get documentation done while you had a cup of coffee.

Thanks to Covid-19, CAA staff have been allowed to work from home. It seems that much of the work was not done, perhaps because they did not have access to a working enterprise management system, even though the CAA spent upwards of R90 million on one a few years ago. So the endless checking and double checking of signatures and box ticking was not possible, and Certificates of Registration and Authorities to Fly took months.

Nonetheless, to give the CAA its due, it seems to have tried its best to sort out the backlog, and as we head into the end of the year, the situation has become tolerable for most users. A noteworthy step forward has been the longawaited ditching of the terrible licence books with not so clear plastic sleeves in favour of a simple wallet sized licence card.

Conclusion

And thus ends another extraordinarily bleak year. From this low point, things can only get better. I still believe that; “This too shall pass” and, “It’s always darkest before the dawn”. With these cliches, let me vacate this page and wish all our loyal advertisers and readers a much more prosperous 2022.j

guy@saflyermag.co.za