The latest demonstration of incompetence by Airports Company South Africa (Acsa) has come at the very worst time of the year for the airline industry it is supposed to service, says aviation expert Guy Leitch.
“This crisis at OR Tambo is at the start of the peak summer holiday season when everybody travels... What we call in the industry VFR, ‘visiting friends and relatives’,” Leitch says.
“It’s a time the airline industry can make money to carry itself through leaner periods. So it’s absolutely essential both for the industry and for the health and wellbeing of all the people who travel.
“This is what keeps the airline industry alive, what makes it relevant and important. It needs to be able to rely on its basic service providers.”
In South Africa this means Acsa and Air Traffic Navigation Services (ATNS), whose negligence and bungling closed airports earlier this year and continues to cause delays and make flying more dangerous than it should be.
The moment a hub breaks down in terms of its reliability, the entire airline network becomes threatened and the operators will just withdraw
Apart from the commercial costs, the reputational damage is huge, says Leitch, publisher and editor of South African Flyer magazine.
“We can’t afford to communicate these messages of incompetence to the international airline industry.”
Far from inspiring confidence, Acsa’s attempt to blame Monday’s fiasco at OR Tambo, which led to 54 cancelled and delayed flights, on a faulty fuel valve caused by a broken gearbox shaft, simply confirms its incompetence and unreliability, he says.
This is the second time in two years the main valve in the airport’s refuelling system has failed, and for two years Acsa has been promising to put in an alternative bypass line.
“The reality is you can’t run an airport on a single valve. If that breaks the whole refuelling system crashes. You can’t do that for an airport. This is what they’ve done — built an entire underground fuel flow manifold with a single point of failure, a single pump.
“Airlines have been clamouring for them to do what they’ve been promising to do, and of course they haven’t.”
From a reputational point of view the local aviation industry cannot afford this kind of mismanagement, he says.
OR Tambo is still an important hub for southern Africa, but this can’t be taken for granted. It is no longer the key hub for Africa that it long was; it has been overtaken by Bole International in Addis Ababa. And Jomo Kenyatta International in Nairobi is making major efforts to become a hub.
On-time performance has become one of the most, if not the most, important metrics of airline performance, says Leitch. Airlines are all networked, and if flights run 45 minutes late and passengers miss connecting flights the network system breaks down.
When flights are delayed for five, six or seven hours, as at OR Tambo on Monday, “it’s a disaster. Compounded by very poor communications from Acsa which just passed the ball to the airlines themselves, which had absolutely no control over the situation.
“The moment a hub breaks down in terms of its reliability, the entire airline network becomes threatened and the operators will just withdraw.”
The kind of systemic breakdown triggered by Acsa’s OR Tambo debacle “doesn’t just have a disastrous impact on our aviation industry, but on many other parts of our industry. Tourism, obviously. Our ability to export, especially perishables. The ability of senior executives to come out here for a quick meeting to decide if they’re going to invest or not. So the knock-on effects are absolutely enormous.”
The commercial consequences of Acsa’s mismanagement at OR Tambo are easily quantified. According to studies by the International Air Transport Association and Oxford Economics, every dollar spent on an airline ticket generates $7 in terms of direct benefit to GDP, and as much as $30 in indirect benefits.
“So if people are not travelling ... because of airport and air traffic management infrastructure failures, the cost to the economy — and in particular to the tourism industry, which is a key component of the economy contributing around 9% of GDP — is huge.
“Having world-class airports is entirely non-negotiable. You can’t have unreliable, and frankly dangerous, air traffic navigation services, and you can’t have unreliable airport infrastructure.”
Acsa’s mismanagement of airports, so graphically illustrated by the OR Tambo fuel fiasco, is “unforgivable”, he says.
“These are the easiest of all aviation services to operate. They’re fundamentally monopolies. Airports have this wonderful blend of airside and non-airside revenue, being the massive rentals they get from shops, parking, advertising and so on. It’s a sure-fire business model. If you can’t make money running an airport you’re never going to make money on anything.”
They’ve lost so many staff that they’re having to combine air traffic control areas. Instead of having two or three air traffic controllers managing different areas, there’s now just one, so you’re enormously overloaded
That’s why around the world airlines are clamouring to start owning the airports they operate from. Addis Ababa is building an entirely new airport that Ethiopian Airlines will own and operate.
As for ATNS, “it has become frankly dangerous”.
“They’ve lost so many staff that they’re having to combine air traffic control areas. Instead of having two or three air traffic controllers managing different areas, there’s now just one, so you’re enormously overloaded.”
Then in July, without warning, ATNS withdrew indefinitely 320 instrument flight procedures that it had failed to update; as a result one airline had to delay more than 3,890 flights, cancel 77 and divert 12 in a single month.
As with Acsa’s OR Tambo disaster, the affected airlines had to bear all the resultant fuel and passenger refund costs.
Leitch believes Acsa is demonstrably not fit for purpose. For more than two years it knew there was a problem with the fuel feed but failed to install a bypass.
“Now the system is broken. Ipso facto, that’s proof that it is not fit for purpose.”
He says it’s beyond time for a leadership shake-up at both Acsa and ATNS.
“My view is that the minister has been ineffective. The obvious thing to do is to overhaul the management and get people in there who really understand the job and can do it.”
The recent revelation of Acsa’s failure to pay service providers underlines the need for CEO Mpumi Mpofu and her leadership team to go, he says.
“Sooner or later you’re going to lose your key service providers if you keep doing that, and then the whole system starts to fall over.”
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.