Capetonian,
About your comment on the 'Rietbok' crash:
There were many cover-ups in those days, as there are now, just that the Nats were better at it.
I think that is would be the ultimate of conspiracy theories to assume that the Nats had managed to arrange such perfect weather conditions for a CFIT (disorientation) incident to coincide at such very short notice with 'sabotage'!
I think that there probably was a cover-up, but not at all in the way that the conspiracy theorists try to claim: Cecil Margo (the chairman of the enquiry) was trying to cover up the fact that one of his pilot fraternity (he was an experienced multi-engined pilot himself) could have made what in those days was referred to as 'pilot error'. There is an assumption in that enquiry that things went wrong from 2,000ft. Well the company minimums were 500ft (935ft AMSL) so it is far more likely that things went wrong from there, and on a dark and dirty night at 950ft, over the sea, with the coast in sight (which could give very misleading visual cues), off an NDB approach (which is notorious for coastal errors and errors just after sunset) and the 'heads down' distraction of possibly trying to use the radar to locate the airport (the Buffalo River mouth shows very nicely on a weather radar, especially those older ones) with weather that 'comes and goes' and if they were attempting an approach on Runway 10 but were over the sea it would have been a 'circling approach' which would have meant a considerable amount of visual flying needed in those conditions. The opportunities for disorientation there are very, very significant. I think that the 'heart attack' assumption was a cover-up to hide the very strong possibility of 'pilot error' disorientation. And as an ex-pilot himself, Margo would have favoured that. If there was
any Nat involvement at all, it would have been to back up Margo's views to avoid the stain of 'pilot error' on their state owned airline. A last comment on that one: I don't think that you would find any modern 'first-world' airline conducting an approach like that with those minimums.
Now, back to Margo and Navyjet707's original question:
Cecil Margo led a government sponsored commission of enquiry into civil aviation in South Africa in the '70s/'80s. His findings were that South Africa was woefully behind the other countries that he compared with that would have similar civil aviation needs to SA due to geography, etc. (He compared SA with Australia, Canada and the USA.) SA was way behind all of them in 'aviation mindedness'. Not a lot has changed on that front. South Africans are just not used to air travel and an extremely low percentage of South Africans have ever travelled by air, even among the 'developed population' that percentage is low. For most South Africans the concept of air travel for leisure is more a once-in-a-lifetime event rather than the at-least-once-a-year event that it is to Europeans or North Americans. Most South Africans that I have spoken to are rather nonplussed at the concept of 'leisure airlines'. Prices there are not very far off what they are in Europe, which will be more out of the reach of the average population than it is in Europe.
There just isn't the market in South Africa for much of an airline industry and the market being skewed by a taxpayer-propped-up and massively lost-making state airline does it no favours.
(Capetownian, I love that term of yours: " kleptocracy"!!)