How safe and pleasant is it to fly SAA?

Article by “An American in Africa” Jani Allen.

September 28th 2004

The South African government holds out its airline as a shining example of “black empowerment”, which carries the name and symbolism of South Africa far and wide. Indeed, for decades, South African Airways (SAA) was famous as one of the best airlines in the world, consistently winning industry awards for service and safety.

Its well-maintained aircraft were highly sought after on the used aircraft market, and the bravado of its pilots became legendary as they operated under increasingly difficult political constrictions, even being denied over-flight rights over their own continent and having to fly around the bulge of Africa to Europe.

Now SAA’s aircraft suffer frequent engine and service failures, often forcing pilots to fly with a long list of technical problems unattended to – and it is no longer an industry leader.

Its recent record is one of appalling service, poor maintenance, serious crime, corruption, and graft – all driven by a reckless policy of ‘racial preferences’ that has put incompetent people in positions of authority.

When the new CEO Andre Viljoen took charge in 2001, he described the organization as “dysfunctional.”

While this was mainly an attempt to shift the blame onto his predecessor, the American CEO Coleman Andrews, the reality was that affirmative action had bitten deeply into the company. Mr. Viljoen stated that his first priority was to “drastically improve declining service,” a decline that has prompted repeated calls by big customers like Anglo-American to improve service, and has even seen South Africa’s national carrier lose the South African Rugby Football Union contract to a local airline owned by British Airways.

Pilots and Affirmative Action

SAA has been systematically replacing whites with black employees. This has included lowering the compulsory retirement age for pilots to 50 years, down from the industry standard of 60. This policy has been a major point of contention between SAA and its mainly white pilots, who recognize it as an attempt to move whites out of the command chain as quickly as possible.

SAA has also deliberately established a policy of not hiring white pilot trainees if there are non-white candidates. Pilots used to be trained in South Africa, but in 1994 – the year the African National Congress (ANC) took power – the company outsourced the training program to (the much more expensive) British Aerospace centre in Australia.

The theory was to put cadet pilots through their paces far from the seemingly ever-present possibility of “racism” and produce a string of high-flying black pilots.

Unfortunately, almost none of the black cadet pilots made it through the Australian training, and were sent home.

This caused great unhappiness in SAA management which, in July 2002, decided to bring pilot training back to South Africa, where blacks might not fail tests in such great numbers.

The few black pilots who made it through the course in Australia were appointed at once to senior posts, but suffered a serious setback in 2000, when seven – that is to say almost all of them – were arrested on charges of bribing their way through the Civil Aviation examination paper that put them at the controls of passenger-jets.

The pilots each paid approximately ZAR7,000 (US$1,100) to get a copy of the Airline Transport Pilots License examination paper before taking the test. Two non-white members of South Africa’s Civil Aviation Authority were also arrested along with the pilots. Two of the pilots were found guilty but fled the country before sentencing, and the rest were suspended.

However when the cases of the remaining five came to court, the files had “disappeared” and the charges had to be dropped “for lack of evidence”.

The parliamentary opposition tried to launch an investigation into this failure to prosecute, but that came to nothing. Today, many of these pilots are back flying for SAA.

One of the black pilots who vanished, Tanzanian-born Issaya Dominicus Nombo, was arrested in April 2002 by the FBI in New Jersey, after his name turned up on a list of pilots found in a cave used by Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Although there was no evidence Mr. Nombo was linked to the Sept. 11 attacks, he has since been held in American territory pending extradition. 44-year-old Mr. Nombo had entered the USA on a student visa for pilot training, granted by the US Consulate in Johannesburg, even though the South African authorities had issued a warrant for his arrest.

Another black pilot, Similo Sircharles Sali, saw his career ended in August 2002, when he was arrested with five kilos of cocaine as he was preparing to fly from Cape Town to London. The South African Pilots Association chairman, John Harty pointed out, “This is the first time in South African airline history that an SAA pilot has been held for allegedly being in possession of drugs.”

Safety issues

In 2000, failure to run a computer program resulted in a very dangerous situation: replacement parts for SAA’s fleet of Boeing 737-200s being run for more than twice the specified service periods. Fortunately, the parts held up without serious malfunction.

In 2000, SAA also started offering the overwhelmingly white, very experienced technical staff retirement packages to withdraw and make way for inexperienced black technicians.

Many whites accepted, particularly after the Australian airline, Qantas, and the Spanish airline, Iberian Air, heard about the offers and set up recruiting offices in Johannesburg.

SAA was thus rapidly stripped of many of its most experienced repair and service personnel overnight.

The result has been predictable: SAA has suffered an increasing number of equipment failures. Fortunately none has yet caused a major disaster, but insiders say it is only a matter of time. Failures include navigation or communication equipment breakdowns, which are called “snags” and are supposed to be fixed (by International Law) before an aircraft is flown.

It is now common for SAA planes to fly even long hauls with significant “snag lists”, which have either not been repaired, or have been “repaired” but are still broken.

This does not hit the headlines – but engine failures do attract more public attention.

In April 2001, a London flight had to be aborted twice in 12 hours because of engine malfunctions on takeoff. The faulty engine was removed, serviced by SAA Technical and put back – only to fail once again as the aircraft was attempting to take off. In August 2002, two separate flights suffered engine failures on the same day, stranding nearly 600 passengers.

According to inside sources, SAA has had more engine failures in the past two years than in the

previous ten.

Cabin Attendants

By October 2002, the affirmative action program at SAA had ensured that 51 percent of all staff were black, with cabin attendants having the highest black complement at 64 percent. At one point, all cabin crew were fired under cover of a “restructuring” process, and had to reapply for their own positions.

This was an opportunity to shed another 500 white staff members by not reappointing them.

At the beginning of 2003, there were some 2,400 cabin crew at SAA, and the sudden increase in (poorly trained) blacks has had what cynics would suggest were predictable results.

Customer complaints have become legendary.

One of SAA’s most prominent critics is an American, Vernon Six, from Austin, Texas, who experienced SAA at its worst.

Travelling by SAA on his honeymoon, on November 14, 2001, flight #SA211, Mr. Six was subjected to the following: - SAA originally assigned Mr. Six and his bride to seats in different rows. When they asked for reseating at the ticket counter, the agent said, “Stop your complaining . . . after about ten years of marriage you will be begging for seats in different rows.”

The air conditioner that keeps the cabin cool on the ground broke down. When Mr. Six mentioned this to a SAA crew member, he says he was rudely informed to “stop whingeing” as the air conditioner was broken and there was nothing she could do for us.

The toilet flooded the cabin and wet his socks, with what Mr. Six says was sewage.

The seat in front of Mr. Six’s wife was completely broken and reclined well past the normal position. She was unable even to eat her meal because the tray was completely in her lap with her laid back.

On his return flight, November 27, 2001, flight #SA220, the toilets stopped working altogether.

He says the captain urged everyone to only use the restrooms in a dire emergency and let a flight attendant know when they needed flushing – and this on a ten-hour flight.

The flight attendants had to use drinking water to flush the toilets, so there was no coffee or tea.

The television screen picture was “jumping” too much to watch the videos.

When Mr. Six reported this to a flight attendant, he was told, “Sorry, but this is just economy class.”

Mr. Six asked for compensation from SAA.

When the company’s black corporate communications manager, Rich Mkondo, refused, Mr. Six set up a website called www.neverflysaa.com, a parody of SAA’s official website, www.flysaa.com.

Mr. Six had over 6.5 million hits before finally closing it down after receiving numerous death

threats.

He had an e-mail list of some 81,000 people, all of them aggrieved customers of SAA.

SAA launched an expensive court case in the USA, trying to have Mr. Six’s site closed down, arguing that his domain name was so close to the company’s as to be confusing. The case went to arbitration, and Mr. Six won. On his web page he quoted his favourite passage from the arbitrator’s decision:

“Respondent [Mr. Six] is correct: no reasonable man or Internet user would confuse flysaa.com and neverflysaa.com. The decisions cited by Complainant [SAA] are nonsensical.”

Recently the airline cut four flights a week to the US because of declining demand. In one service lapse that made headlines, SAA twice in the space of two years abandoned the same child left in its care as an unaccompanied minor on a domestic flight. According to black SAA spokesman Rich Mkhondo, the ticket officer to whom the child had been entrusted “forgot” about her.

Crimes

The largely affirmative-action (black) cabin crew commit many crimes. In just one incident, some 92 SAA cabin attendants were suspended on suspicion of bringing cocaine and other drugs into the country. Other crew members have been suspended for bribing roster schedulers to secure certain destinations as part of their drug smuggling operations. Occasionally their crimes make the newspapers. In April 2000, SAA announced it had uncovered a ‘nest of corruption among staff,’ including charges of male and female prostitution, money laundering, bribery and smuggling during foreign stopovers.

SAA also suffers from extraordinarily high baggage theft rates, with the company having paid out more than R1 million (US$156,800) in the first nine months of 2001 alone for claims on 3,108 stolen bags.

Fifteen SAA employees were arrested during that same period, and another 54 were either dismissed or resigned when threatened with criminal charges for baggage theft.

There are other kinds of theft. One SAA black vice-president was found to have purchased a car for personal use on his SAA company credit card, while another had his house roof tiled on the company card. Shortly thereafter, SAA revoked the credit cards of all vice-presidents.

The height of effrontery came, however, when a previous head of the legal department – the Chief Counsel of SAA – had to ask the company to guarantee a home mortgage. No commercial bank would lend to him because of his miserable credit rating.

He had failed to mention his string of financial indiscretions when he was made top lawyer at SAA, and no-one in the increasingly affirmative-action personnel department had bothered to ask.

R90-million wasted by SAA on a website...

SAA recently had to pull the plug on an Internet venture based in New York after spending over R90 million (US$14.1 million: €11,500.000) to develop a website that would have let tourists arrange elaborate travel packages at the click of a button. The project had been approved by the board but collapsed when SAA asked the South African Reserve Bank for approval to establish the company in the United States. SAA claimed that the Minister of Public Enterprise, Jeff Radebe, had given the project the all-clear, but Mr. Radebe had “either forgotten or had not been informed”.

The project then collapsed in a flurry of accusations and counter-accusations, leaving SAA with the bill, enough to build 1,500 homes at R60,000 each for the poor.

Incompetence

The airline’s incompetence extends into many areas. In one famous incident, a non-white South African diplomat, Jerome Barnes, on his way to his posting at the South African embassy in London, got drunk on the overnight flight from Johannesburg, fondled a flight attendant and called one of the few remaining white pursers “a fucking white bitch.”

SAA, conscious that the vast majority of its South African clientele are whites, promptly announced that the offending SA diplomat was forever barred from flying SAA, and that his name was entered into SAA’s database of banned persons. Less than a week after the “banning”, a South African journalist breezed through SAA’s security system by buying a ticket in the diplomat’s name. The computers must not have been working that day.

The still largely white pilot contingent of the 954 SAA pilots – only 28 were black in mid-2002 – has consistently battled management over personnel policies, and has brought the company to the verge of a strike more than once since 2000.

The core of the pilots’ dispute with the company is their refusal to accept certain cost-cutting measures that, they say, are negligible compared to the enormous waste of what they call

“underperforming management.”

Everyone knows the colour of “under-performing management” but no one dares say so for fear of being called racist (– a crime they can even go to an AIDS-infested SA jail for...– Ed.)

Nigerian Airways

International aviation law requires airlines to make sure their passengers have visas for their destinations, but SAA pays huge fines to the American Immigration and Naturalization Service, because it cannot keep illegal immigrants off its flights.

In just one month, December 2001, SAA paid more than R1 million (US$156,800) in fines on 26 passengers (and, incredibly enough, one crew member) who were held in New York and Atlanta without visas.

Of the 26, 19 were Nigerian, two South African, two British, one was posing as an American, and two were of unknown nationality.

The problem is exacerbated by a code-sharing agreement with Nigerian Airways, according to which flights from Johannesburg stop off in Lagos before going on to New York, allowing many Nigerians a route into the US. Nigerian Airways, by the way, has exactly ONE aircraft, but is banned from flying to Europe or the United States because it does not meet FAA safety regulations.

A particularly spectacular bungle had to do with the acquisition of new aircraft. Coleman Andrews, SAA’s American former CEO, ordered 21 new Boeings, but someone failed to transmit the correct specifications on avionics and cabin interiors to the suppliers. The result was a dramatic cost increase and a lengthy delay while the aircraft were refitted. As if this were not enough, after Mr. Andrews left SAA, the company cancelled its order for the Boeings (some had already been delivered) and placed a new order with Airbus in Europe.

The Airbuses were reportedly cheaper than the Boeings, but considering the initial bungle on the interiors, the cancellation fees to Boeing, and the pilot and service retraining costs (till then, almost all of SAA’s fleet were Boeings) the cost of this series of misadventures must have been considerably greater than if the airline had stuck with Boeing.

janiallan911@hotmail.com

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