In aviation parlance, a circuit is a manoeuvre that is common when learning to fly a fixed-wing aircraft.
It involves landing on a runway and taking off again without coming to a full stop. Usually the pilot then circles the airport in a defined pattern known as a circuit and repeats the action several times.
New Comair CEO Glenn Orsmond has done precisely that in a career with more take-offs and landings than that of most. It has led him to one of the more enviable jobs in domestic aviation: boss of the country’s only full-service carrier.
Kulula resumed flights on December 1, and its BA franchise started this week.
It’s the third return to Comair for the executive, who has held numerous high-level positions in the domestic industry over the past two decades.
Orsmond was Comair financial director between 1995 and 2003. He also participated in the short-lived resurrection of Sun Air as a business class-only carrier between Cape Town and Lanseria as CFO before moving on to become CEO and co-founder of rival 1time. The airline survived until November 2012, by which time Orsmond had moved on.
By 2015, he was part of the team that created Skywise. You probably don’t remember it. It launched in February that year and was closed by November.
Orsmond was also CEO at one point for 1time subsidiary JetWorx Aircraft Maintenance, and, later, Star Air Cargo CFO.
Comair bought Star Air Cargo in June 2019, just weeks after the resignation of then Comair CEO Erik Venter. Orsmond was brought on as joint CEO alongside former Air Traffic & Navigation Services CEO Wrenelle Stander, who had served on the board as a nonexecutive director for eight years up to that point.
It was the company’s second stab at a joint CEO structure and it lasted less time than when the job was shared by Venter and Kulula founder Gidon Novick in 2006. (Incidentally, Novick is launching his own new airline, Lift, this month.)
By the end of last year, Stander was named group CEO, with Orsmond reporting to her as head of the aviation division. But the environment was deteriorating rapidly and by March, Orsmond accepted a retrenchment package.
That was never going to be the end of the story, not by a long shot.
He would later emerge in the business rescue process with a consortium of former Comair executives and raise the capital needed to resuscitate the carrier with a new majority shareholder. It brought him full circle.
It might seem strange that he could accept a retrenchment package in the first quarter of a year and take up the job as CEO in the fourth. He brushed off questions on the issue on my radio show last week and the Institute of Directors says he is unlikely to have to pay back the money he received.
Chair of the institute’s remuneration committee, Ronel Nienaber, tells the FM that if the retrenchment was done in good faith and Orsmond had lost the job for operational reasons, there should be no obligation to return anything. But if he lost the job and all parties knew this was a temporary hold to avoid further costs during lockdown, it’s arguably a different story.
Some guys have all the luck. Some make their luck. Orsmond fits firmly in the latter category.
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