AIRLINE OPS MIKE GOUGH
SAN IT Y
SI LE NTLY
SLIPS BACK IN Without a doubt, the past two years have been off the clock and firmly past the redline of the crazy meter. Luckily, we cannot see into the future – we would not have believed what lay ahead for us – and would have probably jumped in front of a train (if we had any that might be functional).
H
ERE IN SOUTH AFRICA we had our unique brand of lunacy with the way our so-called government went about handling this pandemic. Which other countries have stripped parliament of its powers and oversight functions and introduced a Soviet styled ‘command’ council in an attempt to manage the situation?
My previous employer for the last twenty-four years of my airline career ceased scheduled operations, and carried out a handful of international repatriation flights. The Airbus A320 fleet where I was a Training Captain carried out a significant amount of charter flights for the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), which was a wonderfully lucrative contract. True to form, the utterly inept and corrupt management at our national carrier could not keep things together, and the UN withdrew from the contract and started using another operator.
What happened in Benoni, stays in Benoni
We all have recollections of the hard lock down when we had a few hundred cases – which proves how ineffective those misplaced notions of control actually are. I remember locking up my fleet of light aircraft in my hangar and posting on social media ‘see you in three weeks’ time’. How naïve we all were… Banning roast chicken and hot pies, forbidding the sale of tee-shirts and open-toe shoes perfectly illustrated the absolute cluelessness with which our idiotic leaders approached this invisible threat that had invaded our space. 8
FlightCom: February 2022
As the instructor contingent was kept current after the initial lockdown, I was fortunate to have done several of these charters, which provided a few interesting flights compared to the scheduled operation. One particular route for the UN WFP was JohannesburgLilongwe (the WFP HQ)-Maputo-Johannesburg. I found myself conducting one of these pairings, which saw me and my full crew (two flight deck and four
