[imagesource: Waldo Swiegers / Bloomberg]

There was a time when South African Airways (SAA) was revered around the world, and respected by South Africans.

That day has come and gone, with the company’s guts ripped out by the likes of former chairperson Dudu Myeni, through years of leadership that can most kindly be described as criminally inept.

Earlier this week, a deal between SAA and the SAA Pilots Association (SAAPA) was finally sealed.

eNCA reports:

According to the terms of the agreement, SAAPA members will be retrenched based on their current salaries…

SAA Pilots Association chairperson Grant Back says that the deal is the best under the circumstances.

“We haven’t been paid in 16 months. We’ve been locked out since 18 December and we’ve been on strike since 1 April. Since the onset the company had adopted starving us out, not having paid us what they owed us in 2019,” Back said.

“Not delivering on many promises regarding moneys owed in the past and then of course the lockout happened in December, so 16 months is a long time to go without a salary and I think for us, this is about the best deal we could get with the amount of time we feel we had left for our membership.”

Back is required to play things down the line, due to his role as chairperson of SAAPA, but other pilots are not similarly constrained.

Take for example Phil Parsons, whose Facebook post from Tuesday has been widely shared.

You can read that in full here, with some choice excerpts plucked below:

SAA, you’ve finally done it. Sixteen months after last paying us and twenty six years since hiring me, you’ve pulled the plug and retrenched us all. A sad day indeed.

My sadness transcends the beautiful machines I’ve had the privilege of flying or the wide world SAA allowed me to play in. Most of all my heart is filled with sadness at the loss of the friendships and our camaraderie as South African Airways Pilots – a select and very special band of brothers and sisters…

from every walk of life, from the Head of the AWB Airwing to ANC exiles, SAAF war heros to cadets from far flung rural villages, from the naughty to the God fearing, from playboys to moms with kids at home. Every one with a flying or life story to learn from.
It sounds so cliche but our diversity truly was our strength – with varying skills and experience levels but every last one with a common love of flying and our company, in equal measure…

To say the last year and a half has been testing for us all would be a gross understatement. We’ve seen many of our colleagues pushed to the edge, only for the pilot body to step in and raise funds from within our ranks to help them – that band of Brothers and Sisters to the end.

Sadly many will give up flying and for the the rest it’ll take a few years to return to the flight deck, under completely different circumstances I’m sure ?

Hang in there my friends, this crazy world will eventually right itself.

To JZ, Dudu and your cronies, the toxic mix of your greed and incompetence destroyed a once proud eighty seven year old airline of world repute. You should be riddled with guilt but, as most of the country have discovered, you have no shame.

Enriching yourselves you’ve sewn a trail of destruction in your wake. Thousands of upstanding, hardworking and loyal workers lives have been upended. For the suffering you’ve inflicted you all deserve a special kind of pain. May you rot in hell.

Phil doesn’t have to bite his tongue, and he hasn’t.

Fair enough – I despise Dudu Myeni and she hasn’t even put me out of a job. Yet.

The end of Phil’s post is more upbeat:

To those of you who are entrusted to carry on the legacy in Version 2, I wish you well. May you prove the naysayers wrong. Fly the flag and fly it safely.

Lastly, to all my colleagues and friends, I thank you for the fun and the laughter. Every last one of you has left an indelible mark and I will cherish our memories forever.

May you all find happiness beyond SAA. I will miss every one of you dearly.

Godspeed my friends.

There’s also a little PS, thanking a fellow pilot for capturing his final landing “in our beloved Airbus A340-600, on a perfect day in Cape Town nogal.”

That seems like an appropriate place to finish:

[sources:enca&facebook]