Can we just pull the plug on SAA, already?

South Africa is great. People want to come here. People will always want to come here. I can promise you there will always be flights to and from South Africa; flights that people who are better at the business of flying will provide.

This ego trip of having a national airline needs to stop.

It must be functional, otherwise we don’t need it. For the last couple of years and then some, it’s not really been functional.

Bail out after bail out after minister after parliamentary session after inquiry after CEO after CEO, the airline finally started showing a profit.

Time to show some stability, right? Wrong! Move over corruption and incompetence, the pilots want a bigger cut now.

Keeping SAA on live support

Far be it for me to talk about pilot salaries, benefits and safety but if they’re underpaid and could get more at other carriers, good luck to them.

Let them go to those other airlines and we can see if any stay at SAA on their apparently depreciated pay. If it costs the airline its business and makes it financially unfeasible then why bother doing it?

It’s the lemonade stand that makes lemonade for 20 bucks but sells it for 15… even if the squeezers aren’t paid enough, it doesn’t make the business more financially viable if you give them a raise.

The bigger picture still needs sorting out and to their credit, the pilots’ grievances do deal with some of the HR issues so maybe there is hope.

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Unfortunately, there’s a lot more concern than hope and that concern has to be met with the question of “what’s the point?”.

I’m pretty sure the air force can cart MPs around and it’s not like South Africans demand to go on their European holidays with SAA. It’s also not like SAA is cheaper than its competitors.

So what benefit does pumping a national airline full of life support, only for it to have such little life, have on the nation? Surely, somebody has to stand up and say, it’s just not worth it.

I don’t think any plane in the SAA fleet could get anybody high enough to be able to justify keeping SAA going.

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When will it be stable?

So even if the company capitulates to all the pilots’ demands, what more will the airline have to go through before it can start stabilising? Stability is hardly the first word that comes to mind when you talk about SAA, let alone worthwhile maintaining.

Is it a jobs programme? Is it to train pilots for the air force? Is it to have international bragging rights? Perhaps it’s just because we’ve got so used to plodding along and can’t imagine South Africa without its national carrier.

Whatever the reason, none of that sounds worthy of keeping this thing so artificially alive.

Pushing this thing along so that pilots can have a job makes no sense.

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It makes less sense when the pilots themselves are complaining that they aren’t paid enough.

Apparently there are jobs available at the other airlines, or at least that’s part of their argument.

Disconnected from SA

It made us proud to see the SAA plane flyover at the ’95 rugby world cup but we’ve even got used to private airlines doing the flyovers now.

SAA has become so disconnected from the South African zeitgeist that it’s approaching confusion that we still want to keep it alive.

It was nice, but now it’s over. Unless you can make it nice again and I don’t mean to be rude but good luck with that.

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