South African Airways hiring / expanding this year?

[nugpot]

Originally Posted by CJ750

What is the difference between flying in a multicrew environment in an airline AND flying in a multicrew environment in a $20 million dollar business jet.

There IS a difference, but I agree with you that it should not be very important. After all SAA will have 10-15 years to teach you how to be an airline captain.

Originally Posted by CJ750

working harder than any airline pilot will ever work i must now go to a SMALL airline and get paid peanuts to say i am now getting better experience.

Don't think that you work harder than airline pilots. I will be doing 70 legs in 18 days with a cadet in the right seat. My SMALL airline probably also has more aircraft than your outfit.

I cannot say why SAA likes guys with airline experience. If you really want to fly there, then the choice is yours whether you want to sit and hope that they will take you out of your nice corporate jet or whether you want to go via another airline. There are many guys with 20 years of flying experience at airlines who still want to go to SAA. A short while ago I was one of them. Things have changed for me and and now have my dream job - outside of SAA.

BTW, this is not an argument. Just my opinion of things in general. If your age in your profile is correct, I would say SAA is probably not for you. You will probably retire there as an FO, and I don't wish that on my worst enemy.

[beechbum]

Hey Nugs, just a hypothetical question but if the phone rang tomorrow would you go? Just curious!
CJ750 - Nugpot is right....maybe age is not with on your side anymore! Dunno! Hope to be wrong on that score!

[nugpot]

Originally Posted by beechbum

Hey Nugs, just a hypothetical question but if the phone rang tomorrow would you go? Just curious!

Nope. Time and circumstances ran out for me.

Funnily enough, I am really happy with my decision.

[CJ750]

CJ750

thanks for the input folks. money always helps but for me my family is more important. corporate/charter and a Boss does not allow for a happy family life.

unfortunately i am not SAAF trained and i don't know enough people in the right companies to have got anywhere by now (and i am certainly not selling my sole to VB/NTW), so it looks like i will stick to FL450 criss-crossing africa.

Cheers for now

[Deskjocky]

SAA Hiring?

So as not to pollute the Comair thread, but in order to respond to some posts relating to the credibility of the information I’ve posted:

jbayfan:

DJ, you are the same guy who said SAA will not hire anywhere near 88 pilots this year - well the SAA Exco has approved the hiring of 89!

According to the member of EXCO I spoke to this is not the case, Capt J has been going on about the pilot shortage for ages, the whole of EXCO want to know why he wants more pilots when the fleet has not grown (taking into account the 744 retirement and the 343’s returning to service).

Aside from attrition the only recruitment that seems on the cards will be for the freighters for Cargo.

Fluffy:

DJ sorry, I do enjoy your threads, however as to SAA providing Mango with more 800's......I dont think so, rumour has it SAA getting 2 from our European buddies to replace the ones sent to Mango.
You may be right, I hope not, would be good for Mango to stand on its own two feet and find its own 800's instead of relying on big brother.

Not according to the guys in Fleet and Network Planning (the people who decide on what stays an what goes in the fleet)- definitely no extra aircraft for SAA for this year- they want more utilization out of the ones we already have.

[journeyman]

DJ, as your initial predictions regarding the SAA LCC were, shall we say, less than accurate - please forgive us mortals for being just a teeny bit sceptical when confronted with information from your direction.

Unless it's just a case where, as in most airlines of a certain size, the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing. In fact (no names mentioned) I'm more of the belief that the left hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing! You know the story: local CEO - Airbus - lose a fortune - foreign CEO - Boeing - hedge against your own currency - lose a fortune - Airbus - lose a fortune - launch an LCC, etc.

Here's a prediction for you: within the next decade, Mango will be bigger than SAA domestic, which will eventually fade into obscurity.

[Deskjocky]

Well you seem to be such an expert, bringing such insightful information to the fore how could you possibly be wrong!

[fluffyfan]

journeyman is that your wish or your belief? would be interesting to see Star Alliance customers coming off Business and First class international flights and getting stuck in a LCC and having to buy there own bread roll. The Domestic has been running at a fantastic capacity of late and all indications from the people in the know are that the SAA domestic is doing very well, you may be interested to know that there is a distinct possibility SAA may actually post a profit this year....and yes after all the laughter has died down I will attempt to explain what little I know (now this is from a management feedback session and seeing as it was said in a public enviroment I have no problem repeating it here), this may come back to haunt me but I can only repeat what I have heard.

One theory on the huge loss recently reported is that its the accounting system that has not yet counted a huge amount of revenue, this all has to do with the recent roll over from the Genesis to the Pegasys system (or the other way around forgive me if not correct this stuff tend to bore me) which was a requirement to join the Star Alliance, anyway theory is a huge amount has not yet been counted and is "in the system". I personally can not see how such a huge loss is possible with aircraft running at present capacity.

This is the latest rumour which I would like to believe, because I would like to see SAA make a profit and eventually get privatised one day so the poor old bleeding hearts who care so much for the poor old tax payer (god bless them) can finally be silenced and move on to champion other worthewhile causes like poverty etc, they suffer so much with the burden of standing up for the tax payer all the time its time they had a break from this agony

[journeyman]

Fluffyfan,
It is simply a prediction - I am largely indifferent as to who gains capacity and who loses. What I do wish for is that the nett number of aircraft on a particular domestic route does not decrease, but rather increases or at worst, stays the same. That would effectively mean that nobody loses their jobs, and that's something that should concern everybody in the industry, for obvious reasons.

That being said, I don't believe the status quo can be maintained. SAA is and has been for a fair length of time, a loss making enterprise and as unpalatable as it may be, that is a fact. There is therefore no reason to assume that SAA will be an exception to the worldwide trend of so-called legacy carriers being usurped by the LCCs on their regional route structures.

Oh, and try not to trivialise the burden that SAA puts on the taxpayer - it is precisely that kind of arrogance that could well be your undoing, when the man-in-the-street finally loses patience and demands action.

[jbayfan]

Fluffyfan, you may want to bin your post. SAA is in for a huge loss this year. And HUGE with a capital H U G E!!! It does not help to fly full aircraft when you have reduced your business class capacity by around 40%. SAA has pi ed away around a billion rand in potential revenue by reducing the business class capacity when they installed the lie-flat seats on the entire long-range fleet. The A340-200 went from 42 to 24 business class seats - now they tell the staff that there is no more confirmed rebate travel on A340-200 aircraft because they have a high demand for business class but no capacity. Lufthansa and BA carry 380 pax on their B744 aircraft - SAA carries 330!!

They should double the leg room in economy to 64 inches from 32 inches and they will find that all their aircraft will be full and there will be an even bigger demand for seats. Imagine, an airline running at close to 100% load factors but losing billions a year - wonder how KN and AE will explain that one to parliament?? It must be a legacy factor, blame it on the old regime.

And DJ, you really have no clue what you are talking about. Captain J confirmed at his feedback session last week that the SAA Exco approved the hiring of 89 pilots for the period Dec 2006 to Dec 2007. The only possible reduction being if the additional B738 SAA is looking for does not materialise.
You should change your brand of cheese - your current brand seems to be full of holes

[beechbum]

And DJ, you really have no clue what you are talking about. Captain J confirmed at his feedback session last week that the SAA Exco approved the hiring of 89 pilots for the period Dec 2006 to Dec 2007

From an outsider looking in, it seems that jbayfan seems to have more of the correct figures that seem to be bantered around in the industry. Well this is what we are led to believe. I always admired your posts Deskjocky but it seems lately you're in the dark regarding a few issues, I don't know. Maybe thats what management tells you, as they know you come here and spill the beans.
Anyway as you might or might not know, all the Jan intake was for A340, 2 guys going on freighter in Feb and a further batch on A340 also in Feb. Thereafter a slow trickle for a few on the freighters in the next few months aswell.
I must admit though it seems a hell of a lot of guys/gals to recruit and wonder how the training department will handle the huge influx? I hear outsourcing of training overseas might be an option as the 340 sim cannot cope.
Oh well in time we shall see...........

[Deskjocky]

No more recruitment till further notice...message from HR and it applies across the board.

[Ibhayi]

Are they actually happy for you to circulate memos on the net to a bunch of randoms? Surely not.

Cost cutting, it's all you hear out of SAA, they will keep doing it till they cut their own nose off, if they haven't already. They should try it from the top down not the bottom up.

[Deskjocky]

yea, perhaps a little too much info, although this information is distributed to every employee and so it can be considered in the public domain, anyway point's been made. Couldnt agree more, the fish always rots from the head first. Thing is if you dont chop some big wigs then you dont generate the big cost reductions- you need to chop a lot of small fry to get the same results.

[Ibhayi]

How about chopping Khaya?

Look at his past the the IDC and then at African Media and Entertainment, every single one had severe problems, the IDC unable to get loans back to the tune of R800 million and then AME nearly going belly up under his chairmanship.

Taken lunch in his office recently, I hear u get served on silver platters where as he stopped coffee for so many.

[Deskjocky]

even the grand old days on the 6th floor are over- was in a meeting up there the other day and I was forced to stir my tea with a plastic tea spoon.. I think it would be an understatement to say the boss is feeling the heat...

[Ibhayi]

After some of the sheer absurd nature of some of things he has done/attempted/does I find it hard to believe that removing such trivial things as spoons does anything. Instead he should focus on the real matters, and his salary should be pegged to performance.


There was a wonderful article in the Fortune magazine a few months ago about the requirements for success and one was sheer practice and a deep understanding of ones industry. Here is a man with no airline experience no, decent business experience running an airline and making a joke of himself.

Does Khaya even have a formal university or tertiary education? Before any of you jump on the band wagon saying oh Bill Gates doesn't have one, remember Bill Gates was accepted into Harvard and built his business from scratch where as Khaya is friends with a minister. If that article has any truth to it then we should be appointing from with inside the airline or people with more experience, and affirmative action is merely apartheid in reverse, albeit to varying degrees, the ANC should read our constitution and maybe back date their ideas to when the Freedom Charter was drawn up, which states clearly that discrimination along gender or racial lines has no place in a society that intends to develop socially and economically.

Khaya and SAA as a whole are a joke.

[fluffyfan]

DJ I still fail to see how SAA can save themselves to a profit, does not sound right, if we cant make a profit with our current load factors we never will, the company has too may overheads and not enough revenue, My opinion is that we should be expanding like every other airline at the moment, or are we waiting to miss the boat again? why is SAA not flying to Bankok, Madrid, Lisbon, Sydney, Athens and many other places, surely a good hint is to look at the airlines coming here and wonder why, we have one of the largest portugese/ greek popluations oustide of those countries and we dont fly there, time SAA decided what they want politics or commerce.

And as for no more intake, this should be an interesting development, you can look at as many charts and graphs as you want on crew utilisation but I flew 1 hour short of the legal limit in Jan and that is huge EFP, if every pilot in SAA put in a efp letter the company would be in deep trouble, and you may find more and more people putting these letters in, the company will not be able to hire and train fast enough and once again a short sighted decision by management will cost the company, the company needs to shift from crisis management to long term planning, in my humble opinion.

[Deskjocky]

Fluffy, all good points you raise and frankly I not inclined to disagree. However here's the thing, the place has been poorly managed for too long- and before we hark back to the good old days, they never existed. Under the old regime SAA was a monopoly so you cant say what they did was effective because there was no benchmark. Case in point, we are doing a great deal of work in non direct cost- Im coming across agreements signed in the early 80's that are still current and costing us an absolute fortune. Granted these things are very involved and are not apparent unless you go and look for them but they exist. So you need to clean up before you can move forward.

Before everyone thinks I’m blaming the past I’m not- its just the company has not remained “current” if you will on certain things that have now come to really bit us in the butt. Naturally these issues would not sink the company but now combined with the shenanigans of the last 10 years and you have a real problem.

Yes load factors are high and yes our average fares (in fact we grew our sales by 10% system wide this FY)- particularly domestically- are very respectable but what kills all of this is our cost of sale which is significantly higher than some of our competitors both in contribution to overall cost and percentage of net fare. Same story for our revenue per employee, and the list goes on. These issues are not fixed by getting more aircraft or flying to new routes- if we got these fundamental issues under control routes that loose money would immediately become profitable.

So the bottom line is you need to place the business on a sound footing before you expand- otherwise what’s the point. So we are playing the game on 2 fronts- manage the day to day business- ie where can we make more money out of our assets (hence the chopping and changing of the route structure- which mainly comes form route cancellations as well as looking at ways of increasing utilization and going on to routes that we can make more revenue) and at the same time fundamentally change the way the company does business.

Yes guys are flying to the limit, its not desirable- but in the sort term its better to manage the situation with the current variables and then when the company is back on a more solid footing, look to address those shortcomings in the system. I’m sorry to say that the next few months are going to be make or break, if the fundamentals are not fixed it doesn’t matter how much money the DPE pumps in- it will all go down into a bottomless pit.

[reptile]

Deskjocky/jbayfan/fluffyfan:

Any idea why SAA is running A319's (selected flights) on the JNB-CPT sector? It would appear that the largest seat shortage (for SAA at least) is on this route.