South African Airways (SAA) said on Tuesday that it had signed a deal with Emirates to expand an existing codeshare agreement, in a rare bright spot for the cash-strapped airline.



The state-owned carrier, which has not made a profit since 2011 and survives on government handouts, said the agreement would see the two airlines leverage each other’s route networks, cargo services and flight schedules to boost passenger flows.



South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has been at pains to stabilize ailing firms like SAA, but the extent of their financial difficulties has meant slow progress.



SAA, which hopes to turn a profit by 2021 by cutting jobs and routes, expects to make another large loss this financial year, despite a recent government cash injection of 5 billion rand ($350 million).



“The expansion of our commercial relationship will further strengthen key focus areas of the implementation of our turnaround plan,” SAA Chief Executive Vuyani Jarana said. -Reuters



&#8211; Alexander Winning

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Cash-strapped South African Airways Expands Emirates Code Sharing

It’s not uncommon for flight stewardesses to attract the occasional – and often derisive – comment that they are nothing but ‘trolley dollies’ or ‘waitresses in the sky’. Having been an airhostess for over three decades, Neil Haasbroek should know.
But for Haasbroek and many others of her generation, these remarks didn’t matter. What did was that it was a profession they adored, and one that came with its own sense of pride, dignity and discipline.
Described as “the angel in the blue dress” during a tea party in her honor in Johannesburg, South Africa, Haasbroek, now 80 and settled in the city, is one of the longest-serving airhostesses of one of Africa’s oldest airlines – South African Airways (SAA).
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She began her career in 1957, when SAA was known as SAL (Suid-Afrikaanse Lugdiens) and the country was ruled by the apartheid government. The airline wore a different look then: the tail of its body was orange and it sported a leaping navy blue springbok.
She had joined at a time when being an airhostess was seen as a short-term career option for women before entering their next phase of life – marriage.
But not for Haasbroek. She broke stereotypes and ended up working with SAA for 36 years.
“I had never thought that I would become an airhostess because I thought that I was too short at the time, and not as beautiful as I imagined an airhostess should be,” says Haasbroek.
It was only after she saw a newspaper advertisement that she thought it would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Little did she know then she would spend almost half her life in the skies.
Haasbroek talks of how she moved up the ranks after a two-and-half year stint as a domestic flight attendant to later serve on international routes.
“I remember for the first six months, we only traveled to Australia, those were long flights – 23 hours,” she laughs.
“Thereafter, the world was my oyster. I spent 11 years traveling overseas.”
She then became a check-flight hostess, tasked with inspecting the conduct of the crew. Her most favorite role was as instructor and chief airhostess of the airline.
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“It was very exciting to get a group of girls that I had to train and be like a mother to them, and solve their problems,” says Haasbroek. Part of her job was to make sure the crew looked the part.
“Before every flight, I had to check their hair, make-up, nails and weight. They had to be well-groomed at all times. It was a wonderful career. I loved interacting with people, every flight for me was special and I could leave all my worries at home.” While many of her colleagues got married and had children, Haasbroek was married to her work, and every year, as new aspirants joined the airline, she treated them like her own children.
“I always say one of my greatest regrets was not having children of my own, but the hostesses became my daughters,” she says.

‘Angel In The Blue Dress’

In 1934, Helen Richey was the first female to pilot a commercial airline in the United States. A little less than 80 years later, in South Africa, three female pilots embarked on the first long-range flight with an all-female flight deck crew for South African Airways (SAA).
“I’ve been a captain on the long range for seven years and I’ve never had two ladies on the flight deck with me. These things happened by accident, it was a coincidence,” says Captain Jane Trembath, who flew with Senior First Officers Taryn Hochstrasser and Jocindy Mars.
It’s also about the numbers – there are far more male than female pilots, hence the likelihood of having a male co-pilot is greater. Of the 130,000 airline pilots worldwide, 4,000 are female, according to the International Society of Women Airline Pilots; around 70 of SAA’s 780 pilots are female.
“At 9%, we are still higher than the international average, and [Mars’ cadet program] were at 25%, which is even higher. It’s been through the cadet program that we’ve increased our percentage of women. SAA’s aim was 50-50, but I don’t think that’s ever happened. There were some intakes where only women survived, and women have a higher passing rate,” says Trembath.
SAA has offered a cadet training program since 1994, and it is highly selective including extensive medical and psychometric testing.
“The cadet program only takes a selected number of people, not everybody gets in, you have to be chosen, you have to be good enough, like these two,” she says, pointing at Hochstrasser and Mars.
“It’s difficult to get into the cadet program, I was told they’d received 8,000 applicants. They only chose 16 from those and the selection process took a year,” says Mars.
“We did psychometric testing, if you passed that, you went for a medical and a personality test, and then there is a final interview before you get chosen,” says Hochstrasser.
“You never know exactly what they’re looking for. The most important thing is the actual desire, because it’s a hard road for men as well as women, if you don’t have that desire then you won’t have the tenacity to stick it out. That’s probably what they’re looking for: do you really, really want it,” says Trembath.
Trembath’s non-conformist parents loaned her money to attend a flying school, where she completed her private and commercial pilot’s license. In the early 1980s, it cost around R15,000 to qualify. Today, it costs a minimum of R350,000 ($33,000), and flight training costs around R1,300 ($122) an hour. Due to the cost, some qualify through the air force, many subsequently move into commercial aviation to clock more flying hours.
After earning her wings, it was time to fly, but no one wanted a female pilot, and an inexperienced one at that.
“You always think each step of your commercial license is the most difficult: exams are difficult, getting the hours is difficult, writing your final flight tests is difficult, but it’s not. The most difficult part was getting a job as a woman back in
the 1980s.
“I got turned down for a couple of jobs because I was a woman and I was told that to my face. It took a lot of persistence and I had to hang in there,” says Trembath.
There aren’t many opportunities to gain experience, but newly-qualified South African pilots are hired by South African companies to fly their airplanes throughout Africa.
Trembath became a pioneer in South African aviation: “SAA didn’t have any women pilots before 1988. They accepted me along with two other women [Brenda Howett and Jennifer Burger], that was a whole new thing for the industry.”
In 1993, she was also the first South African female pilot who qualified to fly a Boeing 747-400. During her 32-year career, she is proud to have had many firsts and to have witnessed change.
“Today, as a woman, it’s a lot easier to find a job. In small companies, women are judged on their merits and no one is turned down because they’re a woman,” says Trembath.
There may be more female pilots today, but they still experience prejudice. Between the three of them, they recount stories of hesitant parents, unsupportive guidance counselors and mocking friends. Similarly, passengers do double takes when they see a female pilot, elderly men openly pray during a flight, and passengers pass snide remarks about empty kitchens.
“Two students came to the flight deck to say hello. He was from Netherlands and she was from Finland. She asked, ‘Are you the pilot?’ I said, ‘Yes, didn’t you hear the PA announcements?’ She said, ‘no, so you actually fly the airplane? Females can be pilots?’ It was strange because she comes from a first-world country and yet still has the same perceptions as everybody else,” says Hochstrasser.
They have learnt not to try change people’s minds, but to deal prejudice with humor and through empowering communication.
“Whatever you’re doing, you have to have a passion for it, because it won’t always be easy. Provided that you enjoy it and you’re doing it because you really, really want to do it, don’t do it for anyone else,” says Mars.
Truer words were never said.

Women Power At 30,000ft

Strikes have hit Africa’s biggest economy with a vengeance and the losses are high.
Hundreds of thousands of South African employees went on strike, crippling the gold mines, car factories, petrol forecourts, and the national airline South African Airways (SAA) in August and September.
Towards the beginning of September, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) ended a three-week strike of around 30,000 workers in the motor manufacturing industry, after accepting a revised wage offer from  Volkswagen, Nissan, Ford and Toyota.
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However, as car manufacturers returned to work, thousands of petrol station attendants, affiliated to Numsa, downed tools after serving a 48-hour notice of strike action.
Their demands included a R30 ($3) per hour increase and that maternity leave be paid in full.
The SAA employees, affiliated to the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (Satawu), ended a 15-day strike a day later.
By far the most expensive strike was the one organized by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in the gold mining industry, which was reported to have cost R32 million ($3.2 million) per day. In 2012, similar strikes cost companies R349 million ($35 million) a day and employees lost a total of R100 million ($10 million) in salaries each day.
The strike was effectively ended when NUM, the United Association of South Africa (Uasa) and Solidarity accepted an 8% wage hike, backing off from its initial demand of 15%.
In addition to the wage increase, the monthly living allowance of miners was raised from R1,640 ($164) to R2,000 ($200).
The Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu), however, refused to accept the pay deal. The mining companies were taking a hard-line stance and refusing to give in to the demands while the union was threatening a second strike.
The morning after the strike began, when FORBES AFRICA visited the mining area in Carletonville, Johannesburg, a handful of NUM members gathered outside the union’s office at Sibanye Gold mine in Driefontein, as rival union members reported for work.
“An estimated 14,000 miners had downed tools in the area of Carletonville on Tuesday evening. Our members have not clocked in for the night shift at several mines. The strike is on,” says Mbuyiseli Hibana, NUM regional secretary.
Amcu spokesperson, Jimmy Gama, tells FORBES AFRICA the union had not been given a mandate and was considering strike action.
“We remain unchanged to our wage increase demands. We rejected the offered 6.5%. Amcu demands a living wage of R12,500 ($1,250) and R11,500 ($1,150) for underground and surface employees respectively,” says Gama.
All labor unions in the gold mining sector, besides Amcu, have accepted the revised offer and operations at the mines are back to normal.
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The Chamber of Mines had confirmed that it would continue to talk with Amcu in an attempt to get everyone back to work.
“This tentative agreement is encouraging because it signals a number of important developments for an industry battered by labor instability, fast rising costs, declining market conditions, and continued regulatory uncertainty,” says mining analyst and Eunomix managing director, Claude Baissac.
“Unions have been forced to change their strategy from one of expecting large increases to one that is more achievable. If initial demands were completely unrealistic, these demands were largely part of the posturing unions are doing in relation to one another, notably NUM, and Amcu, the disruptive newcomer. They needed to show their members and each other that they will fight on for the best deal.”
That fight is far from over.

Strikes Strafe  Africa’s Biggest Economy

About 20 months ago, when Harvard-educated but little-known Inati Ntshanga was thrust into the position of CEO of South Africa’s state-owned regional airline, very few noticed.
One of the main reasons, of course, was that 18-year-old South African Express (SAX) had always been in the shadow of its bigger and much older brother, South African Airways (SAA), which has been a dominant force in the continental airspace for more than 75 years. So much so that SAX’s resilience has gone largely unnoticed, notwithstanding the fact that in its short life, not only has the airline survived several one-time competitors that have since gone under, it is now also debt free.
<h3>Now SAX wants to conquer Africa.</h3>
Whereas SAA has gone, cap-in-hand, to the South African government to beg for R6 billion to fund operational costs, its growth strategy and fleet renewal, SAX will be using its own balance sheet to raise the R4.5 billion it intends to spend on 15 new aircraft for its new growth plan. Seven of the aircraft have been delivered, while the rest will arrive between now and 2015 to coincide with the end of current leases of the “oldish” aircraft that the airline still has on the tarmac.
Most of SAX’s old fleet was acquired when jet fuel was in the $20-$30/barrel price range, airline industry analyst Linden Birns points out.
“With fuel today soaring above the $130/barrel mark, the economic model for these planes no longer holds any validity. Not only are they unable to generate sufficiently low seat-mile costs—the standard measure of the cost of production in the airline industry—but they are also rapidly losing their residual book value as demand for these aircraft in other markets has fallen off a cliff.”
In addition to several domestic routes—Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, Port Elizabeth, Bloemfontein, George, East London, Kimberley, Pietermaritzburg, Upington and Phalaborwa—SAX also flies to neighboring Botswana, Namibia, Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
“All of them are profitable,” according to Ntshanga. He is now adding Malawi, Ghana and Uganda to the list and is in negotiations with several other African countries that subscribe to the idea of “open skies”.
While the continent has been slow to embrace open skies—an international policy concept calling for an easing of restrictions, for the liberalization of rules and regulations and for minimal government intervention in the airline industry—Ntshanga says those who have already done so are seeing the economic benefits.
He points to the latest International Air Transport Association (IATA) report, which analyzed the relationship between a country’s level of connectivity to the global air transport network and its level of productivity and economic growth, across 48 developing and developed countries during a 10 year period.
Not only is aviation a major industry in its own right, employing large numbers of highly skilled workers, the report said it is also an essential input into the rapidly growing global economy. The study found that greater connections to the global air transport network can boost the productivity and growth of economies by providing better access to markets; enhance links within and between businesses; and provide greater access to resources and international capital markets.
Noting how air traffic demand increased as economies grew, the report concluded that global economic growth has been a key driver of growth in air traffic demand.
<h3>This has not been confined to</h3>
North America, Europe, South-East Asia, Australia, Latin America and India, Birns points out: “If you want [further] proof of this, just look at
how the size of the South African domestic market grew with the advent of our low-cost airlines, kulula.com, 1Time and Mango, in the 2000s to see how the liberalized regulatory environment gave rise to mushrooming growth.”
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<h3>THE PROBLEMS OF THE AFRICAN AIRLINE INDUSTRY</h3>
The rest of the African continent, though, is uniquely different, something Ntshanga is ready to concede upfront, if not to acknowledge that his ambition could even be thwarted by it.
SAX’s home base, South Africa, and the other countries the airline has been flying to until now adhere to high safety standards. The same can’t be said about many of the other countries on the continent, where carriers are notorious for their tendency to skimp on safety. The most recent IATA statistics reveal that in 2010 Africa had 7.41 accidents per million flights, the worst among the world’s regions and 12 times worse than the global average of 0.61.
Other common complaints usually cited by established airlines’ indifference to Africa are:
&#8211;              too few airports;
&#8211;              inadequate investment in infrastructure;
&#8211;              inconsistent government policies and laws.
Birns explains some of them, and their impact: “The artificial barriers to market access, known as the Bilateral Air Transport Agreements, which are applied in Africa, should be reviewed and liberalized. These agreements currently prescribe which airlines may operate on given routes, the number of flights each airline is permitted to operate on the route, and in some cases, even stipulate the maximum weekly or monthly capacity each designated airline may put into the market. The net effect is that airfares on intra-African routes remain artificially high. And with the global and regional economies under pressure, fewer people can afford to fly. If free or freer competition was permitted, fares would come down and the market would grow exponentially.”
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<h3>THIS IS AFRICA’S NEXT BEST AIRLINE</h3>
“But the challenges do not mean it can’t be done,” Ntshanga says. He has confidence that he’s doing the right thing and is poised to strike gold.
The reason for his calm confidence, and some would say rather rapid expansion?
“Africa is, in fact, low hanging fruit for us… Our market research says we’ll be profitable within two months—and that’s even before those markets reach maturity.” Besides, the economist-by-training reckons, Africa is poised for unprecedented levels of growth, even though that’s admittedly off a low base.
Birns says SAX’s Africa route expansion strategy is “a good one in principle”, but to be sustainable it requires focus on markets with sufficient demand for business and tourism traffic.
That word—focus—is what Ntshanga says SAX swears by. “We have a very good, tried and tested model,” he says.
SAX doesn’t have its own distribution and handling systems but uses SAA’s for a fee. A lot of other services, including ground handling, are outsourced, leaving the airline with a staff complement of only 1 100.
While others still prefer jets, Ntshanga says SAX is opting for 50- to 100-seater aircraft that use turbo propellers but consume relatively less fuel, are as quiet as jets, are just as fast, and are more comfortable. Add to that the fact that the destinations the airline flies to are within a three-hour distance to and from South Africa.
“The lure of money, which often looks like easy money,” is one cause, Ntshanga believes, why other airlines fail. “You won’t catch us flying long routes, or very busy routes where we are a small boy playing with the big boys. We focus, we don’t straddle,” he says.
Birns believes SAX “never competed directly” with Nationwide, Velvet Sky, Sun Air, Flitestar or Phoenix—all of which went under—but was competing against SAA and Comair (the BA and Kulula operations) and 1Time. “It’s precisely because the high-density mainline routes are so fiercely fought over that SAX deliberately operates on different gauges and networks to the others.”
Birns thinks Velvet Sky went out of business “largely due to its failure to have sufficient economies of scale to offer a comprehensive domestic and regional service. Nationwide failed, not because of the engine incident and subsequent grounding—these were factors, but not catalysts of the failure—but because once it resumed operations, the shareholders and management failed to appreciate that they needed to invest heavily in restoring brand credibility and market confidence. They assumed, wrongly, that they could simply pick up where they’d left off and all would continue as if the crisis hadn’t happened.
“SAX is feeling the same economic pressures as every other airline around the world, ie. rampant fuel prices and soaring user charges, levies and taxes. We would be naïve to think these won’t negatively impact SAX’s bottom line. And like every other airline, SAX will want to invest in the latest available technology to help it keep those additional costs in check,” he says.
With humility, but also with authority, Ntshanga goes back a couple of years, before he was appointed CEO. Then, he was part of a crack team that achieved an important strategic tilt—developing and implementing strategies that led to the doubling of revenue and saw SAX become solvent for the first time since the airline’s inception 18 years ago. And that’s when everyone got up and noticed.
Ntshanga believes it’s a matter of time before others see that SAX is no longer the Cinderella operation that was established back in 1993 by black investors Thebe Investments (51%) and a Canadian consortium (49%), only to be sold to the government a few years down the line because it wasn’t doing that well.
Back in the day, SAX would fly to Bloemfontein twice a day. Today it flies there 10 times a day as well as to destinations across Africa dozens of times every month.
“This is Africa’s next best airline,” Ntshanga says.

Tag: South African Airways

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

Cash-strapped South African Airways Expands Emirates Code Sharing

‘Angel In The Blue Dress’

Women Power At 30,000ft

Strikes Strafe Africa’s Biggest Economy

Every Cloud Has A Golden Lining