Comair CEO Erik Venter has expressed concern about South Africa’s draft 2015 to 2020 Airlift Strategy, which covers commercial aviation. (Comair is the country’s largest private-sector airline group.) This draft follows on from the 2006 to 2011 Airlift Strategy, which had the mission of maintaining a competitive civil aviation environment, maintaining safety in the sector (using international standards), providing reliable and efficient services, improving service levels and improving cost and contributing to the socioeconomic development of the country and region.

He had no problem with the purposes of the new draft strategy – to align aviation with National Development Plan priorities (dealing with inequality, poverty and unemployment) and to further promote travel and tourism to and from this country. “It’s a thinner version of the 2006 Airlift Strategy, with the same mission,” he observed. “But the focus is entirely on international travel.”

Rather, he was concerned with the orientation of the draft 2015 strategy. “[T]he approach is fundamentally flawed.” It displayed, he argued, a “silo approach” to the aviation sector, neglecting its links and interactions with other sectors of the economy, particularly tourism. And it had a specific focus on the State-owned South African Airways (SAA).

Venter affirmed that this concern with SAA was based, in part, on misperceptions. Thus, the airline was credited with contributing R9.2-billion to the national gross domestic product (GDP), maintaining 35 000 jobs in the supply chain and 44 000 tourism jobs. But, he pointed out, if SAA disappeared, other airlines would fill the gap with little, if any, damaging effect on the GDP and job totals.

Again, it was asserted that the potential role of national carrier airlines in the development of their countries, including tourism, was shown by the examples of Australia, Mauritius, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates. “[B]ut,” he cautioned, “it is very dependent on the circumstances of the country”.

Another concern was the statement that SAA was falling behind the airlines of the other Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) countries in terms of passenger numbers. This, Venter noted, ignored the fact that South Africa had a much smaller population than the other Brics States.

He felt that the 2015 draft strategy displayed a lack of coordination between the Department of Transport (responsible for the strategy) and other government departments,  including Tourism, International Relations and Cooperation and Finance. It also ignored SAA’s inability to compete with major international airlines on intercontinental routes, in terms of both economies of scale and ticket prices.

He argued that the aim of the strategy should be to get as many people to South Africa as possible, to stimulate the wider economy and create more jobs. If this meant having to rely on foreign airlines, so be it. They would still maintain supply chain jobs in South Africa, but would be no burden to the country.

Venter was speaking at the Transport Forum Special Interest Group conference at the University of Johannesburg on Thursday.