Good day to you all…
Though I am a very passionate commercial pilot I do not earn much of a living out of the industry and mostly work as a management consultant assisting with corporate turnarounds. This I am doing after 20 years of corporate experience in various industries. Though I intensely dislike the SAA operation for being a drag to the SA taxpayer (much like Escom and the CAA) I do not think any of these parastatal’s has commercially changed much in the last two decades or that it will change much within the medium term. Apart from the obvious BEE challenge that is.
I suspect that all its pilots (and probably most employees not on the board) are just too glad to have a decent paying job – irrelevant as to where the money comes from. As such one can not blame them and in my view this has nothing to do with who’s the better employee (or pilot). Nor can anybody in the aviation industry stand the moral high ground – there are very few aviation concerns, if any, in SA that delivers a world class attitude, level of service, operation or profit. And I am comparing with other industries worldwide when I say this. SAA will remain part of the economical landscape (warts and all).
What I find rather hard to swallow is the way that my fellow aviators sometimes love to pull each other down on these public forums – it seems like an industry imploding on itself and I have rarely witnessed such division. Is this a simple case of SAA being “The Parabats” and everybody else just “no good normal infantry” and cannon fodder? It’s bad enough that just about every “non-pilot” body in this industry seems focused on putting these “arrogant egocentric pilots” in their place - do we have to do that as well?
But hey – what do I know…..
Have a great day.
Brand Wessels