And some of their hostesses might even get invited into the camps as guests to be savaged by cheetahs in the night?
Mind you though, when some cool cat flew for AB and night stopped at the Pamodzi Hotel in Lusaka, it was quite common to be awakened at strange hours of the night by the klanging of the telephone and to be told by the night porter, before you'd had time to do more than grunt, that a man was on his way up to your room. These were night fee paying passengers. The hotel reception was always extraordinarily inept at distinguishing between flight and cabin crew room numbers.
But then of course, those were some of the more difficult days for AB. One of the F27s came back from Britain after a refit. There were five new studs on each side of the cabin over the wing emergency exits. This was intended so that in the dark or in a smoke filled cabin, the attendant could just slide her hand down the baggage bins until she came upon the studs and thus identify the position of the emergency exit. Blow me down if the girls all didn't think these neat little mirror things so that they could titivate their make up halfway down the cabin. That was in the days when the chief stewardess reputedly failed her cabin safety check and, having been grounded, was reinstated on the basis of a telephone call from her boyfriend, a man of significant influence. Ops normal one supposes and as nothing compared to the exploits of Air Botswana's one and only bomber pilot.
Air Link and Air Botswana on a head to head is a fairly mind bogglingly adventurous thought. On the one hand, not on time and not quite reliable and on the other hand rather prone to what has euphemistically been described as a spot of bad luck? What a crashingly difficult decision for the punter to have to make? No more scurrilous surmises today though. Well, perhaps one as it's May 5th in Minneapolis. Whatever did happen to that piece of work that was once described as a nasty one who moved from a somewhat senior position in AB to a similar position in an airline of a country just across the Caprivi?