A cunning plan to promote fear of flying the national airline
SA Airways don’t really want us as passengers. I think they would prefer it if we boycotted them and used other airlines instead.
This would enable them to shut down entirely, stop paying departing chief executives huge golden handshakes, and put an end to their annual losses.
Naturally they will deny this is their intention, but why scrap the direct Cape Town-to-London flight if not to chase all those travellers with an aversion to changing planes in Johannesburg into the arms of BA?
Now SAA have thought of a new stratagem to get rid of everyone with the faintest fear of flying. They want to reduce the number of flying hours necessary for a new second-level officer to sit in the cockpit from 1 500 to 250. The idea is that this will make it easier for black men and women to become pilots.
At present some 90 percent of SAA pilots are white which airline director Andile Khumalo called “a congress of white boys”. Personally I don’t mind whether they’re a congress of white, black or blue boys, or even green girls for that matter, so long as they’ve got a lot more flying hours under their belts than a mere 10 overseas return trips.
SAA’s present chief, Monwabisi Kalawe, said the 250-hour guys and gals would sit in the cockpit “to gain the necessary experience”.
Not while I’m in the passenger cabin, they won’t. I demand that everyone controlling my plane is fully experienced, and not in the process of becoming thereof. The last thing I want to do is put my life in the hands of someone doing a crash course.
What about painting a big L for learner on the fuselage of those aircraft with rookies who are still learning the difference between a joystick and a jackstaff? Watching them land and take off at the airport could provide a good Sunday afternoon’s entertainment for those viewers who are fortunate enough not to have family or friends on board.
Travel agents should also be able to warn clients whether the plane they are booking has any 250-hour pilots within reach of harm.
Like Chris Zweigenthal, head of the Airways Association of Southern Africa, we passengers need to know what these so-called second officers’ duties and responsibilities would be.
Would they just sit decoratively in the cockpit and draw a nice salary, or would they fiddle around with the instruments panel and press various knobs to see what then happened?
Worse, would they occasionally be given the controls and told to “take over”?
The good news for nervous travellers is that Cape Town International Airport has once again been voted the best in Africa, so they are pretty safe on the ground as long as they don’t take off above it.
And now if they want to fly to Sydney, they may no longer do so via SAA because the Australian airline Qantas has terminated its code-share agreement with SAA. This will save them having to worry about the flying hours of the cockpit crew. SAA-booked flights to Perth will however continue, for those still keen to reach the most isolated large city in the world, whatever the risks.
But with luck SAA will fly fewer and fewer routes, until there are none left and even the most dare-devil patriots will be forced to travel on other countries’ airlines.