SAA looks poised to return to its bad old days of fatal crashes.
OVER ITS 88-YEAR HISTORY, SAA has been one of the more dangerous airlines in the world. Compared to Qantas with its famous (but spurious) claim never to have written off an airliner, let alone killed a passenger, SAA has had a fearful toll of fatal crashes. Think back to the Helderberg off Mauritius; the Boeing 707 Pretoria crash at Windhoek and the Viscount Rietbok into the sea off East London.
After the Helderberg the airline put in a marathon effort to improve safety and its Flight Operations department came to be rated as one of the best in the world. But now, as SAA V2.0 the Flight Operations department continues to quietly accumulate blunders. As isolated incidents, these blunders may not be significant, but added together they pile up to a moment when the airline’s luck runs out.
There have been a number of warning signs. A year ago there was the ‘alpha floor incident’ on the vaccine stunt flight when the Airbus autopilot had to take over to prevent a basic pilot error from fatally scribbling the huge A340 Airbus across Boksburg. This flight was under the command of Chief Pilot Captain Vusi Khumalo.
‘SAA has been one of the more dangerous airlines in the world’
Now information of a very serious incident that was quietly buried suggests that Khumalo has done it again. SAA flight SA052 flew from Johannesburg to Accra, Ghana on 14 April. The plane was refuelled in Accra and then water was found in the fuel.
The flight was delayed until 15:20 the following day when it departed Accra, operating under the callsign SA9053, the prefix indicating that it was operating out of the normal schedule. Yet egregiously, the A330 carried a commercial load of passengers and cargo under the command of Captain Khumalo, who had recently been promoted to Head of Training, despite having no previous training experience.
Flight SA9053 was over the Kalahari when an engine began surging and stalled. The aircraft descended from FL410 to FL190 and continued on to Johannesburg. The engine continued to surge during the approach and could not be increased from idle power.
Once the passengers, luggage and cargo were off-loaded, the aircraft was towed to SAAT for further investigation. Significant water contamination of the fuel system and engines was found.
This is an incredibly serious incident. The water in the fuel could have caused both engines to flame out and so the crew should have immediately diverted to the nearest suitable airport, probably Gaborone. The SACAA’s incident report does however say that the weather at Gaborone was bad and so the Airbus continued on to Johannesburg with a known problem of fuel contamination and one engine stalled.
SAA seems to have attempted a cover-up as it was only on 25 April 2022 that the SACAA came to learn of this incident due to a report from the Ghanaian Civil Aviation Authority.
There were no repercussions to the near disaster of the Alpha floor incident and it is a very worrying sign that the airline is trying to duck the latest incident. There are already questions about pilot standards at SAA. Unless the airline gets lucky, the odds are stacking up that a serious crash is imminent.
