Position Report

THE THING WE FEARED MOST – so much that we hardly dared talk about it – was a fourth Covid wave. As I write this, it has arrived early and with a vengeance, in the form of the Omicron variant.

Our worst fears are coming to pass. Many aviation companies are still reeling under the repeated blows of the first three waves, so we have decided to give our hard pressed yet loyal advertisers a break by combining our December and January editions intoone.

Despite the indefatigable efforts of our Wayne Wilson, our advertising revenues are under pressure, so we accelerated the natural move away from print and into the digital-only space. This has had tremendous and unexpected benefits – most notably the circulation of SA Flyer and FlightCom has increased almost ten times, as people around the world access our unique and original content via our website, through search engine optimisation.

Thanks to a partnership with Robin Rabec, we are also able to add benefit from the swing to a digital publication platform by including specifically commissioned interviews on the website and to market these via our market leading Facebook page. Thanks to Google and other search engines, and the reach of our Facebook pages, we are driving new readers to SA Flyer and FlightCom.

But we haven’t forgotten our loyal core of long-time followers and subscribers. We are still reaching our long-standing readership base through ‘pushing’ a downloadable pdf version of the magazine to themby email. Furthermore, we have teamed with key industry organisations such as the Commercial Aviation Association of South Africa (CAASA) to email the magazine to all their members.

The digital version of the magazine has had other great spin-offs, especially for advertisers. Most notably; we are able to include links to their marketing video material and have live website links to take readers directly to the advertiser’s website. In this way the reach and effectiveness of the clients’ adspend is vastly more efficient.

But no matter how much better we have become at delivering value to our advertisers, the heart of any publication is always its content. Despite the sea change in the publishing industry, we remain true to our foundational value - of making sure we produce a publication people want to read – which fulfils our key objective of entertaining and informing our readers.

Fortunately, we have been blessed to have developed a core of contributors that make SA Flyer unique. I am most grateful to Jim Davis, who 14 years ago, approached us, as he was unhappy with the aviation magazine he was at. And I am thrilled that, despite the continuing weakness of the Rand, we continue to have the incomparable Peter Garrison’s regular thoughtprovoking columns.

For the past five years we have been privileged to have Darren Olivier’s expert analysis on African defence. And I now have a PhD on the challenges faced by African airlines in providing essential air connectivity. The spin-offs from this study, and in particular with the CEOs I interviewed as part of the primary research, have provided many fascinating industry insights.

I am honoured too to have excellent access to the key leaders and decision makers in the aviation industry. I am grateful to all airline CEOs who always take my calls at any time of the day, no matter how busy they are. I find the insights provided by these industry leaders fascinating and wonderfully informative. And I trust our readers do too. Which makes SA Flyer and FlightCom a key source of reliable industry intelligence.

In this issue we feature Airlink CEO Rodger Foster – who has used the inherent strength of his business to take full advantage of the dire straits his competitors find themselves in. Newly emancipated from his relationship with SAA, Airlink is free to grow – and is already the second largest African airline in terms of movements.

Our regular contributors form the core of SA Flyer, and I am grateful for their commitment to quality writing and fresh insights. With them, and the topical articles we provide, I am confident that we have indeed fulfilled our mandate to entertain and inform our readers and provide the best channel for our advertisers to reach their market.

I am grateful to my wonderful small back-office team that regularly gets the sales traffic and layout and invoicing done without last minute panic.

From the low point of this fourth wave, I feel that the only way out is up. The aviation industry will boom as it makes up for lost ground. There is a lot to be hopeful about and I wish all our readers and loyal advertisers a wonderful festive season and a happy and prosperous new year.

Guy Leitch