Here is a letter from a pilot who wrote to his old mate and outlines the very clear picture faced in South Africa as they are continually forced to implement affirmative action policies. He is a senior Capt/Instructor/ check airman for South African Airways. This is being reprinted without prejudice, or any personal opinion added or deleted. It is verbatim, as received and is merely the viewpoint of someone in the industry.

It is very interesting that the rest of the world has a critical shortage and we here in South Africa have cut back to the wick. A short time back we were threatened with the furloughing of 225 pilots after an American audit team (selcourt) was hired by our now black management. Affirmative action, or black empowerment as they now call it, has taken total control of the airline and quite honestly messed it up.
Black empowerment operates on the demographics of the country, basically a quota system i.e. if there are 80 million blacks in the country and only 5 million whites then that's how the ratios must exist in each and every business. Overnight management was replaced by blacks who had no idea which end of the aircraft was the front. The cabin crew's only requirement is that they are black and some of them have literally just come out of the bush. (You can take them out the bush but can't take the bush out of them).
Quotes from mangers ranged from "why do you need three drivers for an aircraft" to "why do they need so much time for conversions? I can drive any car, why can’t they fly any plane?" to "if they leave we can activate some of the clerical staff."
The frightening thing is these guys have no idea how stupid they are. They would love to have all black pilots if they could (can't find any). We have a few at the moment who have given us endless problems like trying to fly into mountains, etc.
At one stage there was a moratorium on pilot hire. The government insisted on no pilot hires unless they were black. We had scraped every barrel and they were just not available. The airline got itself into a major pickle with new planes and nobody to fly them, so they fixed that by sub leasing the planes to an Indian company.
It doesn't end there. Before we hire qualified keen and enthusiastic males we must first give female pilots preference. We did this only to have half of them leave to get married or go chase boyfriends around the world.
The failure rate of both blacks and females has been high and cost the company a fortune. Luckily no black female has made it in yet as those create chaos on our roads with zero driving skills.
As soon as the other major carriers heard of our plight we had road shows coming out our ears from foreign carriers and they've taken a bunch of our good guys. Air New Zealand took 67 ground technicians in one fell swoop.
The pilots have gone to various outfits. We shut down the Boeing 747 400 fleet over night, so now I'm converting them all to Airbus, poor fellows.
Airbus is a great plane to have when you've got 75 meters visibility, and the auto flight system is beyond reproach, however the 600 series is busy shaking itself to death. In turbulence it suffers from lateral oscillation due to its length, the pivot point about 5 meters ahead of the leading edge.
It won't let you sleep in the bunk as your stomach keeps smacking your bladder and you're up every 5 minutes for a pee, and your ears take a lateral hammering on the pillow as well.
They just found the primary flight control computers about ready to fall through their trays, having worn them paper thin, the bolt holes too suffering severe elongation. Maybe we'll revert to Boeing again someday.
I just bought a new house as members of the community were starting to impinge on the suburb and it was starting to become dangerous and untidy so at my age now am a little stuck here right now, I must admit I'm not terribly keen on becoming a nomadic commuter. I just love hopping in my RV when ever I can for solace and enjoyment.
There still is a lot to be said for this country, still a lot of freedom, and I still intend to fly all around it in the RV. Unfortunately my boys have no interest in aviation.
The FAA paid a visit recently to our CAA that has had its management swamped by previously disadvantaged people (more like genetically disadvantaged). They were to do an audit to ensure airlines were being monitored and safe to operate within the confines of the USA.
To their shock and horror they found the level of competence to which they were accustomed had dropped to dangerous levels and that the people employed were totally incompetent.
The FAA has given them 3 months to get sorted out and then they'll be back to decide whether we lose our rights to operate into the USA and Europe amongst 87 other African airlines that have been banned from the above.
In a rash move (one week) our director flight ops (white) has been moved out of the airline and into the CAA as head (they fired the gollywog). He has now to take up two positions - one as head of CAA and the other as aviation commissioner (government position, they booted the gollywog there too). He is now obviously appointed with the task of ensuring we don't lose our rights. Good luck to him, one day I'll ask him what he was offered or ordered.
By now you've probably heard of the surprise reshuffle of the ANC government and ZUMA is now president of the party. His only claim to fame is that he was a terrorist and he still does his Zulu war dance and chants his rebellious songs at public addresses ("bring me back my machine gun" is his favorite). He has spent the last 4 years in and out of court for bribery, fraud and corruption as well as the rape of an AIDS infected hooker.
He has NO formal education and only learned to read and write while in prison for terrorist activities.
Besides all that I don't give a sh-- as long as I'm paid and the planes hold together and I get to fly my RV. Just thought I'd spread the word. Regards, and have a nice day.
P

Cheri

by Gary Wiblin

I once had a student named Cheri. I am freely using her name as I have nothing bad to say about her. She was a lovely person was Cheri and she took to flight training like a kid to an ice cream cone. She was an extremely introverted person and seldom gave herself much credit for anything that she did well. It was probably this small character flaw (is it a flaw?) that ultimately led to Cheri never attaining her pilot license. It was this meek attitude that was her downfall as, when the tower spoke over the radio to her, she would visibly cringe in her seat as if she were being berated each time.

I tried almost everything I could think of to get Cheri to relax and to listen carefully to the radio transmissions but it was eventually all to no avail. When the radio crackled to life, Cheri did not hear an instruction, she heard a voice from the Gods barking at her to get a move on! It got so bad that eventually one of the senior air traffic controllers phoned me up and asked what could be done about the situation. He said that, each time Cheri went on a solo flight, the ATC’s would go onto immediate alert and would closely monitor the flight. The reason was, he said, that she would do unpredictable things whilst flying. The tower would ask her to join the circuit on a left hand downwind and she would be positioning for a right hand downwind. They would ask her to do one orbit on downwind, she would repeat it back, and would then just continue flying the downwind without actually doing the orbit. She was a dangerous girl, was our Cheri.

On chatting to John in the tower about this problem the two of us hatched a plan. We were going to make Cheri listen up, whether she liked it or not. I was to send her off on a solo flight and John was going to give her instructions that would make an airline pilot cringe. This was in fact not as malicious as it initially seems as the idea was to try and make her think, rather than just read back a standard instruction. I felt a bit guilty as Cheri innocently strolled out to the aircraft to prepare it for the flight but some things just have to be done, you know. As she started the engine, I settled back in a comfortable chair with a portable air radio switched to the tower frequency. I could picture John rubbing his hands with glee.

The radio crackled to life and we heard a timid Cheri politely ask for taxi instructions for a flight to the general flying area. John barked back with “Alpha Bravo Charlie, I read you strength 1, say again”. She gently proffered another request, a little more firmly this time. “ABC, I read you strength 2, say again”. With a bit of desperation in her voice we heard a fairly strong request this time and John relented, just a bit. “ABC, taxi to the gate, on reaching the gate, wait for the 737 to pass from right to left, thence taxi to abeam the number 5 parking bay and do your run-up checks on the number 5 parking bay, facing West. Eish! There was a good 15 seconds of absolute silence while Cheri thought about this. John growled; “ABC, did you copy?” A soft, stuttering voice came over the radio and an attempt was made to read back the clearance. “Negative ABC, I say again” and he proceeded to repeat the clearance. This time she got it a bit better but obviously not to John’s satisfaction. This time his bark was louder; “Negative ABC, I will say again” and he again repeated the clearance.

Needless to say, Cheri eventually got it bang on but I think it was more due to her now becoming quite annoyed with this rude chap in the tower with a zillion stupid instructions. The torture didn’t stop there either, as when she had completed her pre-take-off checks, he had another go at her. “ABC, taxi to the 17 holding point, wait for 10 seconds, thence taxi to the airforce taxiway and park, facing west, on the east side of the holding point”. Huh! I sat up in my chair. Surely Cheri was going to fluff this too? Well, imagine my amazement when she got it pretty much right. Even John was silent for a while, probably for the first time in history! Was our Cheri getting the message, literally?

Anyway, I will not dwell on the rest of the flight other than to say that we experienced a modicum of success. By the time she got airborne Cheri was pretty perked up and she was keeping a sharp listen-out for any more long, involved radio instructions. The sad part though is that, by the next flight, she had again reverted back to not listening to the tower properly and we never did make any further headway. She sadly gave up flying eventually and I never did hear from her again.