Robert Kirby: Loose cannon
There is nothing, and I mean nothing, as singularly bottom-of-the-South-African commercial barrel as any South African airport. We all know how ungracious and self-serving the average South African businessman is. We know how the more pious their mission statements, the meaner the service that can be dredged out of the average South African business enterprise. You know that the louder any candy-brained South African senior executive bleats about the inalienable rights of his customers, the more he will overcharge them, ignore their needs and generally go as far as possible out of his way to fuck them around.
We all know these things. But it has taken a stroke of creative brilliance to lump a great greyish wodge of these commercial negatives into the string of obnoxious entities which are our airports. Taken as a whole, South African airports have set a new industry standard when it comes to making life harshly intolerable for that part of the public which comes into contact with them.
I don’t want to get too particular in this, the first of what will be two or three occasional columns on the subject. Indeed, it would be irresponsible, in the limited compass of just one article, to try to evaluate the Airport Company’s prodigiously oppressive contribution to our public life. Each time I have to undergo the experience of a South African airport, I know I will be re-inspired.
In general terms, what is it that makes our airports so dreadful? You can pass through the gloomy vastness of, say, Heathrow and, notwithstanding the smug British bureaucrats who run it, the grime and the noise, the chain-food and the peculiar horrors of British public lavatories, you usually emerge without feeling your human dignity has been violated in some way.
In a recently built major airport in the United States, it takes an average of 12 minutes from when a passenger enters the building to when that passenger is safely seated in the aircraft. Maximum total walk: 50 yards. No one shouts at the passenger. Check-in and everything else is available along the way. No busses. No kilometre-long corridors.
Try entering a Cape Town airport building where the prevailing ethic is to give the passengers the most wretched 40 to 50 minutes possible. As that synthetic air clamps around you, as those walkie-talkies crackle and yap, as that Jeyes Fluid smell slides up your nose and that gaudy cretin- music spits at you, you know you’ve made a mistake. Fight your way to the check-in counter wondering why you’ve somehow got into a rugby brawl. Angry fellow passengers are also caught in the cross-flow ruck. They thud against you. People kick each other, crash their trolleys against shins.
A South African Airways check-in clerk smiles pleasantly but you can’t hear what he’s saying because immediately above your head crashes down one of the Airport Company’s most potent forms of customer- assault. This is the airport announcer. The voice is nearly hysterical because someone’s “still delaying a flight”.
All communication in all South African airports is conducted in the brief silences between the airport announcement mortars. As the flight departure times click closer, the announcers turn up the volume on their passenger-malice. Their voices rise, their crude enunciation grows denser, eventually they begin to upbraid in authentic Nuremberg strains: “We will offload you passengers if you don’t report immediately to gate 10!” All it lacks is the “Achtung! Achtung!”
You get into the bus which will take you on a magical mystery lurch around the apron. The Airports Company bus-driver always leaves the engine running and all the doors open. You sit for 15 minutes in a thickening fog of diesel exhaust fumes.
There, I’ve been getting particular. This is because last week I had to undergo the Cape Town International Airport twice in one day. The horror is too fresh to ignore.
ENDS