Black pilots at the embattled South African Airways (SAA) have pleaded with the airline’s business rescue practitioners to save their jobs.
The pilots, in an open letter to the business rescue practitioners, Les Matuson and Siviwe Dongwana, said black pilots were in the firing line of the last in first out rule – and that transformation is almost nonexistent in the industry.
“Currently South African Airways employs just over 600 pilots and Africans make up only 10% of the pilot body. Of the 10%, only five are African women. Other South African airlines, including Mango, which is state-owned, have shown little or no interest in transforming the aviation industry, ” reads the letter.
“To us, this means that if South African Airways and SAX (SA Express) were to close down, there would never be a transformation in our country’s aviation industry. For African in the next generation, there would be no hope and no future to make in the aviation industry.”
Matuson and Dongwana have already sent unions their plan to lay-off all of SAA’s employees and also bringing up the possibility that they might not even get their severance packages, depending on the success of the company’s plan to sell assets.
Government, which is SAA’s sole shareholder, last week told Matuson and Dongwana that the state could not support SAA’s request for further funding of R10 billion or provide any future funding to sustain the business rescue process.
