Gidon Novick to launch a new airline in South Africa. Gidon Novick has astounded everyone by announcing the launch of yet another low cost carrier in South Africa
Gidon Novick is best known for launching the low-cost carrier (LCC) airline model in South Africa. Its zany kulula.com branding and cheeky advertising was revolutionary for the normally staid Comair. Jet enthusiasts around the world fondly recall the wonderfully annotated Boeing 737 dubbed ‘Flying 101’ with its fun captions painted on the plane.
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O when Novick announced in July that he was going to start yet another LCC in South Africa, and in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, people sat up and took notice. Novick joined Comair as a young chartered accountant with a fresh MBA minted in the USA. In joining Comair he
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stepped into the very large shoes of his father Dave Novick, who had headed the airline for over 50 years. Gidon Novick defied the sceptics when kulula.com proved profitable from inception and was responsible for most of the dramatic growth South Africa’s domestic airline market has enjoyed. After being joint CEO of Comair with Erik Venter until 2012, Gidon left
the airline industry for fresh challenges – in loyalty programmes and then tourism and hotel funding. However, like many airline CEOs, he has been unable to resist the lure of airlines and, ever the visionary entrepreneur, he astounded industry watchers by announcing his plan to launch yet another LCC, despite it being the most difficult of times for the industry, worldwide and particularly in South Africa, which has endured severe anti-Covid-19 lockdown regulations. Novick’s rationale is that the entire aviation industry is going through; “a reset and this creates new opportunities. Survival more than ever, will be based on efficiency and avoiding the complexity that airlines inevitably accumulate over time. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to start with a fresh, efficient and unencumbered business model,” he says. “If we have a super-efficient operation and the lowest costs, that will give us a competitive advantage. And over time that gives us a lot of security,” Gidon says. “The opportunity is now, because aircraft values are down around 40%. One of our key lessons from the current crisis is to avoid debt. We have managed to do that in all our
