Phil Parsons, a senior captain with the grounded SAA, like many of his colleagues, is in the airline’s waiting room. There are 4,500 people with him.
From that group, only 1,000 may be re-employed when SAA takes to the air again. He hopes to be back in the cockpit, but only 40 white pilots, who once dominated that job, will be hired back. Of the 350 SAA pilots, only 88 may be retained.
Parsons — who sticks to "Zulu time", the local aviation term for Greenwich Mean Time, two hours behind SA time, for this interview — says he began flying in the SA Air Force on DC3s, DC4s and Hercules C130s. He joined SAA in 1995 and flew Boeing 737s, 747s and Airbus A340s and A330s.
In the meantime, as retrenchments are negotiated, he is doing other work to make ends meet, like all those SAA employees who have not been paid for the past 16 months. During this time, Parsons has been blogging about their plight and his blogs have gone viral.
Speaking of his pilot colleagues, he says the recent ground time has "been tight". "The younger guys with kids at school, wives at home and big bonds really battled," he says. "As a group the pilots made funds available to the more needy."
At 57, he counts himself as one of the lucky ones. His son is out of the home and Parsons has been able to reduce his overheads. If he doesn’t get his old job back, he will turn to the US, the Middle East or Europe. He talks wistfully of getting a gig similar to the one he had for three months in the early 2000s (during a holiday break from SAA) when he flew a Saudi prince in his private 747 Jumbo jet.
Thirty-five SAA pilots are preparing to go to the International Aviation Services to gain experience as American airline transport pilots. That will require them to do simulation and written pilot’s tests in Miami, Florida. He says US airlines retrenched most of their over-50 pilots, so there are many opportunities as regional airlines there take to the skies in the coming months.
It would also open the door to a special-skills visa in the US. As the American carriers slowly ramp up to pre-Covid schedules, there may be a pilot shortage.
At home, he believes SAA can be turned around. He has confidence in Comair founder Gidon Novick, who recently launched low-cost airline Lift, and Sandy Bayne, ex-SAA director of operations.
Both are now at Global Aviation and with the Takatso consortium, which is relaunching SAA with a 51% share. He predicts that there will be too little space in the low-cost airline space. SAA’s Mango is set to go into business rescue and has been grounded by its management while Lift resumed some flights this month. FlySafair has been keeping up a steady service.
If anyone is going to make SAA a success story again, he says, it is "those two guys", Novick and Bayne. If Mango closes it will be another 700 jobs lost.
Parsons pulls no punches about who to blame for SAA’s demise: Jacob Zuma and Dudu Myeni, the former SAA chair.
"She was put there [by Zuma] to cut up the spoils," he says. The airline, he adds, could have been saved back in 2015 in a deal with Emirates that Myeni canned. She has been declared a delinquent director, but that is little compensation for people like Parsons and the many others in SAA who are about to lose their jobs.
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