Up, up ... and away: corruption-riddled SAA was once a source of pride

“How can it be said there is no money in aviation?” asked US aviation pioneer Jimmy Doolittle. “That’s where I left all of mine.” SA’s taxpayers, confronted yet again with South African Airways’ licked-clean begging bowl, might agree. The airline has soaked up billions upon billions of rands in state aid, which has done very little to keep the air flowing under its wings.

Meanwhile, the circus carousel that is upper management spins faster than a turbofan at full power as CEOs arrive full of hope, only to pull the ejection handle as soon as they learn that the best way to turn around a bankrupt, jealous, staff-bloated, state-owned legacy airline is to have nothing to do with it at all.

If they’ve been smart with the paperwork, they may even enjoy the descent back to Earth under a gleaming golden parachute.

It would be nice to be able to say it wasn’t always like this, to believe that “troubled SAA” — one of the world’s oldest airlines still in existence — is only in trouble because the government, hooked on the allure of owning a flag carrier on which it may fly (in the front cabin and at the taxpayer’s expense, of course), won’t take it out behind the barn and give it the coup de grâce.

“Begin as you mean to go on,” said Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon, “and go on as you began.” If it wasn’t for the date — 1872 — Spurgeon could have been talking about SAA.

The truth is that, but for a pot of government cash 90 years ago, the airline might never have got off the ground.

Its story begins in 1929 with a World War 1 fighter pilot and aviation evangelist, Maj Allister Miller, and an £8,000 subsidy offered by the South African government to anyone mad enough to launch an airmail service.

At one shilling a mile, the subsidy was never going to cover the costs of even a small airline. But it was still free money and Miller, who was not easily discouraged, went looking for backers.

Enter the Atlantic Refining Company, which put up another £5,000 in capital in exchange for two seats on the three-person board of what would shortly be named Union Airways.

Miller bought five De Havilland Gipsy Moth biplanes. The two-seat Moths could carry just one passenger and a couple of mailbags, although, as writer James Byrom points out in Fields of Air, once the mailbags were loaded “there was little or no room for passengers”.

The first airmail flight took off from Cape Town on August 26 1929 with Miller at the controls. For the next four years the little wood-and-fabric biplanes droned across SA’s skies, carrying the post and a few thousand hardy passengers who chose what Byrom calls “intolerable” flying conditions over long, hot journeys by train.

The flying was hard and dangerous. In the space of a few months in 1931, two new Puss Moth planes broke up in flight, killing all on board. Then Miller wrote off a new six-seat Fokker shortly after takeoff from East London

“Sitting in open cockpits in cold, wet weather, groping through dense fog, or being bumped and bounced through a sky full of invisible corrugations and potholes, they made their way towards their destinations with pride and purpose,” he writes.

The flying was hard and dangerous. In the space of a few months in 1931, two new Puss Moth planes broke up in flight, killing all on board. Then Miller wrote off a new six-seat Fokker shortly after takeoff from East London. Passenger services were suspended while he went cap-in-hand to the government for more aircraft.

Sensing, perhaps, that bailing out the airline would become a regular drag on the fiscus, the government promised to help but did nothing.

Achtung! Bail out!

Desperate for new planes, Miller made a deal with German aircraft maker Junkers, swapping a share in the airline in return for new, all-metal aircraft with enclosed cockpits and more room for passengers.

Union Airways staggered on until one day — December 14 1933 — with the hilltops lost in mist, a Junkers crashed into a mountain near Eshowe in what is now KwaZulu-Natal, killing five of the six people aboard.

It was the end of the road for the cash-strapped airline. Miller sold out to the government, and on February 1 1934 South African Airways was born.

The deal was soaked in controversy from the start, writes aviation historian John William Illsley in his book In Southern Skies. First there was the “excessively high price” of £50,000 that the government allegedly paid for Union Airways’ assets, which amounted to little more than a handful of aircraft.

The second issue was the growing German influence in SA’s skies. The Nazis were in power in Germany. Junkers aircraft droned overhead. In Westminster, the friendship between South African defence & railways minister Oswald Pirow and the local Junkers man, one Herr Hoepfner, was raised in the House of Commons.

“Both were of German background and both were said to have Nazi sympathies,” writes Illsley.

Meanwhile, the fledgling airline bought new planes — three-engine Junkers Ju 52 “Iron Annies” and sleek, fast Junkers Ju 86s. The robust Ju 52s helped convince the public — still shaken after the air crashes that had brought down Union Airways — that flying was safe.

The airline’s hub moved from Durban to Rand Airport in Germiston. New routes were opened, such as a flight between Johannesburg and Durban three times a week and a Durban-Cape Town flight that overnighted in Port Elizabeth. The trimotor Junkers may have been safe but they sure as hell weren’t fast.

By 1939, SAA was carrying 39,000 passengers a year. Then war broke out and the South African Air Force (SAAF) commandeered the fleet to ferry troops to east and north Africa. The Ju 86s were converted into bombers.

In for the long haul

War is bad for people but great for technology. In 1945, powered flight was 42 years old but it had evolved like a Silicon Valley startup. Planes were ever stronger and faster, and flying higher and further. The war ushered in the Jet Age, though propliners would dominate the airways for some time yet.

SAA spread its wings. Surplus DC-3 “Dakotas” were bought cheaply from SAAF stocks and pressed into service on the rapidly expanding domestic network.

The jewel in the crown, though, was the transcontinental route to London. In the 1930s, British Airways forerunner Imperial Airways had operated a flying boat service that over eight days picked its way down Africa, hopping from lake to river to lagoon.

Maybe the war had made people more aware that time was precious. Eight days may have seemed fast in the 1930s; now it was ponderous. In November 1945, SAA launched the Springbok Service, an intercontinental flight from Johannesburg to Bournemouth in the UK.

For anyone with a sensitive stomach, the flight in lumbering Avro Yorks — crude descendants of the Lancaster bomber — was a three-day torturefest with only the overnight stops at Nairobi and Cairo offering any respite from the cold and draughty cabins.

Despite the discomfort, demand for seats was brisk and the frequency was increased to six flights per week. It still was not enough. SAA traded its 16-seat Yorks for 30-seat Douglas DC-4 Skymasters, which in turn gave way to Lockheed Constellations with their distinctive triple tails.

The “Connie” changed everything. It could carry 50 passengers from Johannesburg to London in just 28 hours. With its pressurised cabin it could also fly over the worst of Africa’s aircraft-battering weather instead of through it. Demand for sickbags plummeted.

By 1956, SAA’s new, long-legged, state-of-the-art DC-7Bs were put on a new service called the “East Coast Express”, which cut the Joburg-to-London trip to 21 hours, with a stop in Khartoum for fuel. The DC-7s also opened the “Wallaby” route over the Indian Ocean to Australia via Mauritius and the Cocos Islands. The planes flew at night so the crew could navigate by the stars, because to miss the Cocos Islands and its fuel tanks would not end well.

This was a golden age for SAA. It owned some of the world’s most modern aircraft. It had glamour and prestige. Its pilots were godlike. It was even making a little bit of money from passengers and airmail contracts. The future looked rosy.

And then it was 1961.

Agents of the orange tails

On May 31 1961, SA quit the Commonwealth and became a republic. Not much changed at first for SAA, which by now was firmly in the Jet Age with a fleet of 11 Boeing 707s. The four-engine 707 was the disruptor of its time. It could carry 156 passengers. More passengers meant lower fares. That pace accelerated with the arrival of the first 341-seat Boeing 747s in 1971.

Now (almost) anyone could fly.

On October 31 that year, the Sunday Times headline screamed: “SAA GOES JUMBO”. “Enter the giant Springbok,” said a story extolling the benefits of the new planes.

“In appointments, service and passenger facilities, they are nothing short of five-star hotels,” gushed Sunday Times reporter Geoffrey Berridge, “offering a standard of ultra-luxury that marks out the South African fleet as king of the air lanes.” (How disillusioned Berridge would be with modern air travel.)

But as the 1970s rolled on and the apartheid machinery tightened its grip, SAA found itself shut out of African airspace. The solution was a 3,000km detour around the bulge of Africa to Ilha do Sal, Cape Verde, which became a sort of mini SAA hub where aircraft would stop for fuel and fresh crews would take over.

If there had been a capitalist down there at Kitty Hawk, he should have shot Orville down and saved us a lot of money

—  Berkshire Hathaway  CEO Warren Buffett on investing in airlines

One night in 1982, it was former SAA captain John L’ange’s turn to skipper an SAA 747 flight from Sal to Frankfurt. Climbing out over the sea, L’ange “was overcome by that particular sense of peace and wellbeing that I invariably felt when flying that giant of a machine, the Boeing 747”, L’ange wrote later in World Airnews magazine.

As the aircraft reached its cruising altitude, the cabin controller asked L’ange if one of the passengers — a private pilot — could visit the cockpit. Although this was against the rules, L’ange agreed and the passenger was shown into the cockpit.

Squatting between the two pilots, the passenger, seeing the flashing strobe lights of an oncoming aircraft, said: “Hell, I’m positive he’s at the same altitude as we are!”

At first the crew disagreed. The semi-circular separation rule meant that planes flying on opposite headings would have at least 2,000ft , or 609m, of separation between them.

Still, L’ange flashed his landing lights at the approaching aircraft, which flashed back. At a closing speed of 1,000 knots — 1,853km/h — L’ange became “decidedly uneasy”, he wrote.

“A microsecond later, both the first officer and I instinctively reached for our autopilot disengage buttons in order to take evasive action, but too late — in a flash he was past, the big yellow orb on its blue background, the logo of Lufthansa, seeming to fill the side window as he flashed past.”

It was as close a shave as it gets. On landing, both crews filed near-miss reports and a bunch of air traffic controllers — from the Canary Islands — found themselves en route to the UK for extra training.

Such incidents, though not routine, rarely make the front page. The next time SAA did was when a Boeing 747-244B Combi named the Helderberg — flight SA295 from Taiwan to Johannesburg with 159 souls on board — fell into the sea in a flaming fireball in the early morning of November 28 1987.

The last person to speak to Helderberg commander Capt Dawie Uys was the air traffic controller at what was then Plaisance Airport in Mauritius, which the Boeing had been desperately trying to reach.

Later that morning, the Sunday Times borrowed a private jet and sent a team of reporters and photographers to the island to cover the story.

The first debris to be recovered was scorched. Of the few bodies recovered, postmortem results showed severe smoke inhalation in two of the passengers.

The subsequent inquiry ruled that there had been a catastrophic fire in the cargo hold and that this had led to a loss of control or the plane breaking up in flight. The investigators could not say for sure what had started the fire.

In some ways, the Helderberg disaster became a symbol for everything that was wrong with late-’80s SA.

With the country embroiled in the Angolan war, speculation grew that the plane had been carrying munitions for the apartheid regime. There were wild tales of rocket fuel. The conspiracy theories reached their apogee with a claim that the Helderberg was carrying “red mercury”, a substance used to “make” terror weapons and that, in fact, does not exist.

After Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990, the skies began to clear for SAA once more. The orange tail would make way for a new tail bearing the colours of the new South African flag. Pilots and cabin crews would represent the rainbow nation. New planes would replace some of the old Boeings. The sun was rising.

On May 10 1994, three SAA 747s flew in formation over the Union Buildings in Pretoria, greeting new president Mandela.

The crowd that had gathered on the lawns pumped their fists in the air and roared their approval.

A year later, seconds before kickoff in the Rugby World Cup final between SA and New Zealand, Capt Dennis Spence flew another 747 over Ellis Park Stadium. With Mandela wearing a Bok jersey and the Flying Springbok roaring overhead, the All Blacks never stood a chance.

Coleman Andrews and his vast golden parachute and Dudu Myeni and her cronies were still far off in the future. That day, SAA was golden.

●History source: The SAA Museum Society 

On March 13 1967, the SAA Vickers Viscount “Rietbok”crashed into the sea while on final approach to East London, killing all 25 people on board. The cause of the crash was never determined.

Investigators speculated that Cpt Gordon Lipawsky may have had a heart attack while flying and that first officer Brian Trenwith was unable to take control of the aircraft. The presence of two people aboard who were opposed to the apartheid government is now the basis of a conspiracy theory that the aircraft may have been sabotaged by government agents.

Johannes Bruwer, acting chair of the Broederbond, had apparently begun openly denouncing apartheid. Also aboard was an American human rights activist named Audrey Rosenthal, who had been working with the Defence and Aid Fund to help families of jailed and exiled ANC and PAC members.

Both Rosenthal and Bruwer believed they were being tailed by the security police.

—  The Rietbok conspiracy