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The South African National Defence Force, which has previously struggled with budget issues, has spent a whopping R34 million for a charter flight for a group of visitors to Cuba and then transport for at least one general to Germany.

The expensive military excursion didn’t exactly work out well, either. The plane was detained at the airport in Kingston, Jamaica, for five days due to irregularities with the passengers’ visas, with accusations of possible human trafficking. This delayed the general’s return flight and that of the group by an extra week.

Over the past week, Rapport, a sister publication of City Press, has been asking the military and aviation authorities about the huge costs of the flight. As of now, the military hasn’t responded to any of these questions about why the flight happened or how it was organised.

According to the flight data on Flightradar24.com, the Airbus A340 (coincidentally, one previously belonging to SAA) flew from OR Tambo International Airport via Dakar (Senegal) to Havana, Cuba, on 27 April. The passengers were left in Cuba before General Rudzani Maphwanya, chief of the defence force, and his entourage flew to Germany the next morning for a visit.

It is odd that such a large jet was needed to fly a few people to Germany, but more irregular that the jet flew to Riyadh and Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, Banjul in Gambia, and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates straight after Germany, seemingly picking up a bunch of people on the way.

According to reports in the Jamaican media, the jet landed at the international airport in Kingston on 2 May, having flown via Cairo in Egypt, carrying 253 Indians, German crew members, one Frenchman, a Russian and a citizen of Uzbekistan.

At this point, there were problems with some of the passengers’ visas along with uncertainty about the purpose of their visit.

There were passengers not listed in the initial landing permit application, sparking allegations of human trafficking. Some reportedly claimed they were on their way to work for a construction company in Nicaragua.

The passengers were allowed to stay in a hotel under police watch while Jamaican and Indian authorities negotiated. Meanwhile, the plane was grounded and forbidden to fly any further without them.

Klaus-Dieter Martin, MD of Universal Sky Carrier – which operates this single jet – denied the human trafficking allegations, noting that the plane had simply been held back due to the customs authorities detecting irregularities in the visas.

Maphwanya reportedly sat waiting for the jet to pick him up in Germany at this time, even though he and his entourage could have returned on a commercial flight. Only five days later when the jet was authorised to return to its airport of origin in Dubai did it stop to pick up Maphwanya in Frankfurt. The aircraft then flew to Havana to pick everyone else up before finally landing back in Johannesburg on 11 May.

One chartered flight operator said it’s baffling that the plane was hired and allowed to make a bunch of other flights in between the original round trip. This arrangement also has massive implications for the accounting of the flight, according to Treasury regulations.

According to the operator, the military usually requests quotations for such flights and specifies that the plane be used exclusively for these purposes for the duration of the visit. This is precisely why chartered flights are so expensive, as the operator must include all the “working days” of the plane in the calculation of costs.

“With a quotation, an operator must also specify a standby aircraft that could take over a flight if the first plane becomes inoperable. In this case, the standby aircraft should have been available to handle the return flights from Germany to Havana and Johannesburg on the specified dates.

A quote outlines the number of passengers, exact dates, and destinations for the requested flight. The operator gives a specific price, and the contract goes to the one offering the cheapest flight.

R34 million is a massive amount, and the question is whether the operator made extra flights at the military’s expense, of which the delay in Jamaica definitely didn’t help.

[source:citypress]