TOM EATON | There’ll be no more green in SA’s skies, and I’ve got the blues about it

The collapse of an airline always feels like a step back into a less connected world, but the end of Comair, knocking out about 40% of SA’s domestic air travel, and leaving us with only the eternally ropy SAA and a shattered rail network, suddenly makes Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban feel awfully far away from one another.

At its best, economy class air travel is uncomfortable and tedious. At close to its worst, it can be exhausting and enraging. Many people who flew on Kulula or Comair-operated British Airways flights across SA will be able to tell you about cancelled flights, lost luggage and, in a few cases, emergency diversions and slightly-too-heavy white-knuckle landings.

These experiences, however, are not unique to Comair or SA, and I must confess that, for all the lumps and bumps, I will miss Kulula.

In its first few years it managed to create a brand that exuded a cheerfulness largely missing from the vast, impersonal and often unpleasant airline industry, and, on an entirely personal level, I enjoyed writing now and then for their in-flight magazine, the editors of which took the job seriously and genuinely did their best.

Kulula’s fleet might have been somewhat middle-aged and rough around the edges, but for a tall person like me, the extra inch of legroom in the older planes made the average flight in a clapped-out Boeing infinitely more luxurious than anything I’ve ever experienced in economy class on a brand new Emirates A-380.

Whenever SAA runs out of money, Pravin Gordhan can simply help himself to our taxes, but Comair operated in the real world, and the real world has been cold and cruel in recent years.

Those plucky little Boeings, however, couldn’t outrun the catastrophic turbulence of Covid-19 and an ill-fated attempt to buy eight of Boeing’s now-notorious 737 MAX planes. Whenever SAA runs out of money, Pravin Gordhan can simply help himself to our taxes, but Comair operated in the real world, and the real world has been cold and cruel in recent years.

And now here we sit, with dramatically fewer options, another 1,200 people out of work, and the country’s remaining airlines being told that price-gouging will not be tolerated, which is officialese for “Do your sums, figure out your ideal fines-to-profit ratio, and start gouging accordingly”.

On Thursday, as I read about Comair’s almost certain death, another story popped up that gave me a brief moment of hope.

According to Reuters, India has won an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for building 75km of concrete highway in just five days. Granted, this highway is almost sure to get its own entry in next year’s book for taking the fewest days ever to crumble into white dust, but still, I thought, we are a resourceful species, and surely if India can build 75km of crappy highway in five days, we can build a few thousands kilometres of slightly less crappy highway in the coming years, and keep our major cities connected?

And then I remembered what petrol costs, and that it’s probably now cheaper to buy Comair than it is to fill your tank.

No, better to wait for the next brave airline to step into the gap and try to make a go of an increasingly brutal industry. Or start planning your December road trip round the block.