From Creamer Media in Johannesburg, this is the Real Economy Report. National carrier South African Airways is installing a locally developed satellite payment and tracking system on its airliners. Schalk Burger has the story.

Schalk Burger:
A locally developed satellite authorisation system is being installed on all airliners of the national carrier’s fleet.

The SatAuth system enables credit and debit card payments for duty-free goods to be made in-flight worldwide. The system has to provide telemetry data to determine above which territory the payment was made to enable South African Revenue Services to determine foreign exchange implications.

However, this telemetry data also enables the aircraft to be tracked anywhere in the world, says SatAuth inventor and MD Paul Roux.

SatAuth inventor and MD Paul Roux:
The system was primarily designed to allow banking transactions, credit card transactions, primarily, as well as debit card transactions, to take place at 39 000 feet. This would then connect directly with the bank for the transaction, would get approval and we would get an answer in real-time.

What this would eliminate was stolen cards, fraud onboard and also the possibility the passenger walking off with the goods when there is no money in his credit card to start with.

The third part of the system was that it allowed us to have a transaction take place with a GPS coordinate, which was then giving us the ability to allow the reserve bank to know where the transaction took place in terms of the forex laws in South Africa.

With that in mind, we decided we would make that an additional feature to the SatAuth server and allow the aircraft tracking to take place via the same system.

So, the primary design was to build a banking server allowing banking transactions to take place while in-flight, real-time. But, now we also have the ability to track the aircraft to independent database, which the airline has full access to, both in real-time and also post-flight. So that they can go back and verify the aircraft’s flight path, its altitude, its airspeed, what weather it avoided and the likes of, just based on the telemetry data we ship down to the ground.

Schalk Burger:
Engineering and maintenance division SAA Technical CEO Musa Zwane discusses the role and roll-out of the system on its transoceanic flights.

SAA Technical CEO Musa Zwane:
We are actually planning to roll the system out to a whole lot of our wide-body aircraft, the A330s and A340s. Why it is important that we roll it first to the wide-body aircraft, it’s because they are the ones that are flying across the ocean where we sell duty-free on-board.

That’s the exciting part of this technology. All you need is an A-check, an eight-hour, on the ground servicing of the aircraft. It is in the normal run of our business.

Schalk Burger:
The SatAuth system was not primarily designed as an aircraft tracking system, but, if the frequency of the transmissions is set to 15 seconds, then the location of the aircraft at the final transmission received can be pinpointed to within 2 nautical miles.

Shannon de Ryhove:
Other news making headlines this week: A study reveals that policy certainty is a key green-technology enabler; and SAA again chalks up its financial year loss on impairments and international operations.

A newly released study has identified policy certainty and coherence as a “critical enabling factor” for the accelerated adoption and roll-out of green technologies across various industry subsectors in South Africa, including the coal-heavy electricity sector.

The State of Green Technologies in SA panel chairperson Professor Eugene Cloete

National carrier South African Airways has posted an operating loss of R374-million for the year ended March 31, 2014, attributing its fragile balance sheet to impairments dictated by its Long-Term Turnaround Strategy and lacklustre profits from intercontinental operations.

SAA acting CEO Nico Bezuidenhout

That’s Creamer Media’s Real Economy Report. Join us again next week for more news and insight into South Africa’s real economy.