If you’d happened to stroll through SA’s busiest airport — OR Tambo in Joburg — on Monday, you wouldn’t have thought that British Airways (BA) was in the midst of a reputation-battering safety storm. BA flights, operated by Comair, had only just been given the right to fly again last Thursday after the SA Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) suspended flights for five days following safety incidents on three routes.
Yet on Saturday, two days after the "precautionary suspension" was lifted, there was another incident, in this case with a faulty landing gear warning light. It wasn’t serious, as it turned out, but the timing was awful.
By Monday, many of the BA flights were delayed, some by hours — not exactly helpful if you’re trying to win back trust and project an aura of reliability. Yet passengers wouldn’t have got much help at Joburg’s flagship airport: not a soul could be seen at the BA "customer care" desk, which remained triumphantly unbothered by such a trifle as the notional appearance of customer care.
It was an eloquent metaphor for how Comair has frozen in the headlights of this safety storm. Perhaps the "customer care" staff had figured that with so few daredevils actually willing to climb aboard a BA or kulula flight right now, they’d be better occupied elsewhere.
This marks a nadir in Comair’s proud 76-year history. Until 2019, it was able to boast that it was "the only known airline to have achieved operating profits for 73 consecutive years". This enviable record ended on May 5 2020, when Comair tumbled into business rescue.
It was already in trouble when the pandemic hit, thanks to an ill-fated decision to upgrade its fleet by paying for two Boeing 737 Max aircraft (which were never allowed to fly after these planes at Ethiopian Airlines and Lion Air crashed).
By December 2019, Comair’s debt had more than doubled to R4.9bn from four years before, causing its interest bill to rocket tenfold to R332m. When Covid arrived, the lockdown was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.
But as 2022 began, and with R1.4bn in new funding, Comair was poised to capitalise on the travel bounceback. The last thing it needed was a safety scandal.
So what actually caused this? Were the incidents just coincidence? Or was there a deeper structural cause?
Comair, led by CEO Glenn Orsmond, was too jittery to discuss this crisp issue with the FM, and demanded written questions. In response to these, it provided impermeable technical jargon — another own goal for an airline that has manifestly failed to communicate properly with the public.
I’m not sure Comair knows this, but companies are inanimate beings; it’s the people who run them who have ‘views’
Asked what the CAA had found, Orsmond’s airline waxes: "The findings concerned the level of evidential support of some change management systems and procedures relating to quality assurance processes, the structuring and personnel in the safety department and documentation flow regarding repair confirmations."
Beyond simply stab-yourself-in-the-ear awful writing, does that look like an airline trying to communicate legitimately in a time of crisis? What is it even trying to say? That its quality control was shabby and the people in the safety department aren’t doing their job?
Later on, Orsmond says the CAA had wanted Comair to "increase the extent of evidential support to the safety department’s findings in the quality management system".
Now, that’s a few "circle backs" and "ideations" short of a word salad. But pressed to elaborate, Comair reveals that what this meant is that the regulator didn’t believe there were enough people in the airline’s safety office.
"Despite a reduction in the fleet size and recent satisfactory audits by the CAA, the regulator now found the offices of the safety officer and quality managers to be underresourced," the airline says. But don’t worry, it adds, these findings were "immediately addressed".
Given the implications — that the business rescue may have led to costs being cut in the sort of departments where costs shouldn’t be cut — you can see why Comair might have wanted to swaddle itself in a shroud of corporatese.
But Comair says this isn’t the case. While it says it has cut its workforce to reflect post-Covid demand, "maintenance and safety are not areas where costs can be reduced as these are both subject to rigorous oversight, not only from the regulator but by franchisors and manufacturers".
Asked about low passenger numbers — on some routes, passengers have entire rows to themselves — Comair says it "has not noticed any increase in customer cancellations".
Which would be surprising, given the mounting complaints about the fact that on some of these affected flights, Comair left customers dangling in the cold.
In February, one person on a BA flight from East London to Joburg that had to return to the airport after the landing gear failed to retract said passengers were stuck in the airport for nine hours "with no communication, no water, no food, just rudeness and ignorance from staff".
Asked about the shoddy communication, Orsmond’s airline says this "extraordinary event has revealed certain weaknesses in the way Comair communicates with its customers". But it is apparently "working hard" to fix this.
But is it really? In response to questions from the FM, Comair didn’t even have the stomach to say who the answers came from, rather attributing it to "the company". I’m not sure Comair knows this, but companies are inanimate beings; it’s the people who run them who have "views". It seems just another way to dodge accountability.
So here’s a tip: ditch the opaque references to "evidential support" for your "change management systems" and tell people what’s really going on. If an airline can’t front up properly — when there have been safety incidents on four flights in a month — that is what will torpedo confidence. It would be the reputational equivalent of leaving the customer care desk unmanned at precisely the wrong time.
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