Mon séjour en Afrique du Sud (Cape Town)

The air force has been described as close to collapse.

This is after Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota yesterday revealed that the SAAF has only 20 fighter pilots and in the past three years has lost 91 pilots and 822 technicians.

Answering a parliamentary question from Freedom Front Plus MP Pieter Groenewald, Lekota said reasons for skilled staff leaving included better salaries, more chance of flying actively and the perception by white staff that their career opportunities were restricted.

Responding to the news yesterday, Groenewald said bluntly it seemed that the air force was collapsing.

Helmoed Römer Heitman, military expert at Jane’s Defence Weekly, said the SAAF was indeed “on the cusp of collapsing” and warned that the situation was getting close to becoming “irrecoverable”.

Lekota, in his written reply, said the air force was training 123 new pilots and had four trainee fighter pilots.

Defence chiefs earlier this year told MPs the situation was bleak. They said they were losing skilled staff in droves to foreign countries, including Australia and the Middle and Far East, as well as to the private sector in South Africa.

They revealed that many of those who had quit were squadron commanders and said the SANDF had further lost about 910 technicians in 2007 – more than 11% of its entire technical staff.

Heitman said it was a fact of life for air forces everywhere that some of their trainees would later seek work in the private sector, and this was important for the economy.

He said the SAAF’s small operational budget meant that instead of flying 20-30 hours a month, some crews were flying as few as four hours and this was not only boring but well below the minimum required for safety.

Heitman said in addition to the factors Lekota mentioned, there was also dissatisfaction in all the country’s forces with the calibre of some of the officers who were promoted.

Technicians were often not well treated and were frustrated by a system that operated on the basis of maintenance being done “just in time” rather than “just in case”.

Groenewald said that, apart from the concern about the pilots, the “true crisis” was the huge loss of technicians.

“Without technicians, aircraft cannot be maintained or flown. This is also one of the main reasons why the Cheetah fighter jets were phased out four years earlier than originally planned,” the MP said.

The FF Plus had warned Lekota since 2005 that affirmative action and a restricted budget would lead to the air force collapsing, he said.

l Last year deputy minister of defence Mluleki George said in his budget speech that the Defence Department had devised a strategy to counter the exodus of pilots and technicians by introducing an incentive scheme and that they were looking at ways to encourage pilots to join the reserve force.