WATCH: Blackburn’s ‘Oh, The Glamour!’ is a flighty memoir of a life among the stars

On the morning of 28 November, 1987, South African Airways (SAA) flight attendant Michael Blackburn received a panicked call from his grandmother.

“One of your planes has gone missing,” she told him. Blackburn turned on the TV to an image of the SAA Boeing 747 Helderberg and a newsreader confirming the news.

“Gran,” he replied, “a 747 doesn’t just go missing. It’s either behind a mountain or underwater.”

Throughout the day, distraught family members and crew gathered at the then Jan Smuts International Airport awaiting more news on the flight from Taipei to Johannesburg, via Mauritius.

ALSO READ: Helderberg crash victims remembered 35 years on

That afternoon, the government issued a statement saying the plane had gone down 20 minutes outside Mauritius, crash-landing into the ocean and killing all 159 people on board. It later emerged the plane had suffered a catastrophic fire in the cargo area.

‘Tragic story’

Blackburn, now 65, had been with SAA since 1980 and knew all the crew and could have been on the flight.

“It’s a tragic story,” he said. “I flew the very next day. I was booked to work a flight to Frankfurt. In business class, one of my duties was to hand out copies of the Sunday Times. On the front page was a picture of the Helderberg and a headline that read, ‘The tomb in which they died’.

“As I was handing it out, I had to tell the passengers to have a good flight. You could have dropped a pin on the carpet and heard it. There was a dead silence all the way to Frankfurt. It was eerie.”

After four days in Europe, he returned to find SAA was struggling to source volunteer crew willing to work the Mauritius-Taipei route.

“The crew were paranoid. SAA hired two clinical psychologists to counsel the staff.” He volunteered.

For the next three months, he said, “I was interviewing people at the airports in Mauritius and in Taipei, everyone from crew, to baggage handlers, people at the hotels. Anybody who would give me their ideas of what might have happened.”

Blackburn’s ‘Oh, the Glamour!’

He knew he would ultimately write a book. After 40 years at SAA, Blackburn was offered a severance package in 2020.

He now volunteers as a guide at the SAA Museum in Germiston and has used his downtime to write his story, Oh, the Glamour!, which is part autobiography, part tribute to the Helderberg. Despite the tragedy, the book details life as a flight attendant.

ALSO READ: What really happened to Helderberg?

“I’ll never forget in the ’80s flying Joan Collins out of Johannesburg to London,” said the flamboyant Blackburn, who arrives like a parade and speaks a mile a minute.

“I decided to wake her up early in the morning just before I put the lights on for breakfast, and told her: ‘Miss Collins, you need to use the bathroom’. She jumped up in a baggy shirt and ski pants … and came out looking like a million dollars.”

Nelson Mandela

He fondly remembers former president Nelson Mandela on the Lebombo 747, which is now parked at the museum.

“He was sitting in first-class in seat 1A in 1995, with his secretary Zelda la Grange, and we were going to New York City.

“I asked him what he’d like to drink with his hot meal and he said he’d like a sweet wine. Unfortunately, in first class we only carried dry wines, but I managed to make a plan with a small bottle of Nederberg Stein from economy class, which is a semi-sweet.

“He just had one glass. He also had rice with chicken for dinner and I remember him having a sweet sherry after his meal.”

On average, he said, air stewards are away from home about half the year, which was the case early in his career when SAA flew around the world. In the 1980s, the World Health Organisation moved to abolish smoking on aircraft.

“I remember flying to London once and a passenger said he knew exactly how to get away with smoking in the toilet. He was a firefighter from Newlands.

“Later when he went to the toilet, I could smell the smoke in the cabin. When I forced open the door, he was standing with one foot on the toilet lid and a cup over the smoke detector on the ceiling. He got such a fright, he dropped his stompie and I grabbed it and took it to the captain.

“I felt a bit sorry for him because when we landed at Heathrow, three policemen boarded and frog-marched him off the plane. He was flown back to Joburg the same day and received a £500 [about R10 900] fine.”

The allure of his profession is detailed in various descriptive stories throughout his book.

“The glamour comes in when you get off the plane. I remember stepping out of my hotel on Broadway and walking down Broadway, doing my best John Travolta impersonation. That was glamour!”

– news@citizen.co.za