I try and restrain myself from getting involved in these threads but sometimes I just can't resist.......
I'm with Paxboy on this.......SAA could very well be a candidate for the Swiss Air / Sabena (aka bankruptcy) restructuring that occurred a few years back.
It just gets to me when I hear people talking about how they want SAA to be profitable blah blah blah, given the amount of supposed effort that has been put in over the years why isn't the airline profitable....just how much bailing out do they need???
It is a down right disgraceful the amount of taxpayers money going into it, with seemingly no guaranteed rates of return.......just like Comair or any other private company could get away with that - as if!!! They'd have to go to their investors, present a sound finanical case or go to the markets. A level playing field this is not.
As far as SAX is concerned they seem to be doing well from what we hear. Obviously it is difficult to get figures as Transnet tend to bundle everything together when they report. It is good to hear that SAX are making money - for the last 3 years so we're told, however does that mean for the first 10 years they ran at a loss? Be interesting to know whether in the 13 years of SAX ops they have cumulatively made a profit or a loss......I'd love to know.....but what I do know is that any privately owned business can't sustain years of losses and remain in business.