The air force is trying to sell itself in the new South Africa. Jan Taljaard visited the Pretoria air show.
Last weekend Top Gun blistered into town on augmented turbo-fans. Tokyo Sexwale briefly ruled Gauteng from the air; the American F16 took top honours in the phallic stakes; and the British Red Arrow aerobatic team showed off skills that hinted at a military lineage of exquisitely executed yet not always sensible cavalry charges.
The Russians allegedly had to borrow tyres, but in the end conquered by executing the “cobra” — a physics-defeating manoeuvre that had a 30-ton jet fighter coiling upwards and backwards.
The flying extravaganza was the culmination of the South African Air Force’s 75th birthday year.
It was a year in which the SAAF attempted to sell an old air force to a new nation. This was a year of flying precariously as the restructured armed forces had to justify their share of the tax rand against demands for social upliftment.
To the SAAF’s credit, they did not go about it by joining the gang of plumbers, restaurateurs, art-gallery owners, panel-beaters, computer vendors and other entrepreneurs in trying to portray the Reconstruction and Development Programme as their sole driving force.
A slightly more subtle approach had them adopting a birthday slogan proclaiming the SAAF to be the “Pride of the Nation” and, perhaps more imaginatively, airlifting Commander-in-Chief Nelson Mandela to a mountain top for a performance of the Air Force choir.
But, while the celebration year had its RDP moments, last week’s air show had precious little to do with social upliftment.
The spectacle was, rather, a celebration of predatory power and speed, of sheer visceral thrills and drumming decibels. It was beautiful. One sensed that to most spectators it was incidental that the aircraft were actually designed as killing machines.
Yet the air show — displaying, for the first time, the latest new-generation jet fighters on South African soil — was a strange lesson in aesthetics. The nation which produced Wassily Kandinsky and Marc Chagall also showed what were arguably the ugliest, though perhaps most functional, aircraft.
The brutal-looking Russian Sukhoi, while bearing some resemblance to the American F15 it was designed to counter, had unsightly bulges where avionics and other tools of the trade were seemingly slapped onto the fuselage, almost as if these were an afterthought.
It was the USA, the nation which spawned the likes of Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock, that seemed to be building the most beautiful planes.
But perhaps more telling than flowing leading-edge extensions and smoothly rounded edges was the fact that the pristine F15 stayed on the ground for the duration of the air show, whereas the Sukhoi astounded with its performance.
And two of the better anecdotes came from within the Russian camp. One (confirmed) had Gauteng premier Tokyo Sexwale going up in the passenger seat of a MiG29 — and proudly proclaiming on landing that he had ruled his province from the air.
The other story could or would not be confirmed by anyone in the SAAF, but good authority has it that when the Russians arrived it was noticed that the tyres on their landing gear was in a bad state.
The SAAF donated new tyres in a flurry of goodwill. No, we will not confirm, said an SAAF spokesperson. They were our guests and we are not going to put them in a bad light.
Of course the birthday boys also had their turn, showing off the quite amazing Rooivalk attack helicopter, some old aircraft and some very old aircraft.
Ironically, almost the only black faces to be seen in a crowd of half a million belonged to American servicemen. In the end, the air show flaunted the white man’s technology for the benefit of other white men.
And as planes thundered over Pretoria, burning up an estimated million rands’ worth of fuel per day, it is quite possible that someone down there in adjoining Atteridgeville or Mamelodi briefly looked up while wondering how many bottles of paraffin at R2,20 a bottle could be fitted into a household budget.