A debate is raging over whether Saturday’s ultra-low flypast at Cape Town Stadium was safe, but I am hesitant to take a position. Since the weekend I have discovered that I am one of only a few hundred South Africans who is not an expert on the thrust-to-weight ratios of passenger jets and the density of air over elliptical sports stadiums, and so I think it’s wiser to withhold judgment.
This is not to say, though, that I can’t appreciate the arguments being put forward by both sides.
I agree, for example, with those who celebrated the flypast as one of our newer traditions and a bona fide national symbol. It’s an almost perfect metaphor, this moment when enormous, empty vessels, completely out of reach of the citizenry, roar past, gushing noise and heat, before disappearing again for weeks or months at a time as we gaze at sport.
I’m being facetious, of course. The fact is that we are a country that loves dangerous, spectacular things, like moving to Cape Town during a Super El Niño with planned desalination plants delayed, according to GroundUp, until 2036. When it comes to flypasts, many of us clearly want something that speaks to our souls, or at least the tarry smudge of smouldering dopamine and gambling apps where our souls used to be.
Certainly, some of the coverage has featured such hyperbole and hyperventilation that it’s made me suspect the influence of other, less friendly agendas.
To these South Africans, the pearl-clutching by international news organisations, especially in the UK, must look like proof that we are made of sterner stuff than the milquetoasts of the Global North.
Certainly, some of the coverage has featured such hyperbole and hyperventilation that it’s made me suspect the influence of other, less friendly agendas.
I’m not suggesting bigotry, because this column is only 760 words and I don’t have time, but I do suspect that if two British Airways airliners had done exactly the same manoeuvre over Twickenham, some of those outlets currently wetting themselves into origami nappies made out of Health and Safety pamphlets would have been telling us how the spectacle evoked memories of Spitfires skimming over the hedgerows of the Home Counties.
On the other hand, an awful lot of those Spitfires ended up upside down and on fire, which is why I can also see where the other side are coming from.
To be clear, I have no doubt that the crew on those two planes were some of the best in the world. South Africa hasn’t had a fatal airline disaster since the crash of the Helderberg in 1987, and pilot error played no part in that tragedy.
Still, some of the defences of Saturday’s flypast sounded more than a little flat, not least Airlink’s insistence that the entire thing had been carefully planned, rehearsed and approved, as if the reason for people’s anxiety was that they thought the pilots had taken the two planes out for an unsanctioned joyride. Disasters happen despite plans, rehearsals and approval. That’s why we call them accidents.
It also didn’t help that many South Africans seemed to embrace the apparent danger of the stunt as the very thing that had delighted them and given them a flush of national pride.
Since Saturday, social media are awash with AI-generated images showing the two aircraft either as minibus taxis or as being piloted by delivery bikers, the joke being that we South Africans are used to reckless driving, not only taking it in our stride but seeing it as part of our national DNA.
This, of course, is not quite the endorsement they think it is: comparing the flypast to two symbols of the unchecked carnage on our roads does, I’m afraid, somewhat make the case for the prosecution.
The arguments will continue, at least for a day or two until the next shiny thing comes along. There might even be an investigation. But I think, as the pink smoke clears and the downwind residents of Green Point swallow hard and tell each other that all’s well that ends well, the true meaning of that spectacular, heart-in-the-mouth moment has already made itself clear.
Ultimately, it was a distillation of pure South African-ness: brave, unsubtle, exciting, alarming, showing brilliant individual skill, steeped in corporate branding and yet somehow a genuine ritual of human togetherness; and all of it putting a great burst of colour and noise and agitation between us and the news that Waterkloof Air Force Base, the sharp end of the spear for aviation in this country, has collapsed to a point where it cannot field one operational squadron.
Bread, circuses and now low-flying planes …
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