Justin Pearce
AN easy way to kill 80 000 people muttered the man at the Africa Cup of Nations final as the Boeing 747 swooped over to ruffle the hair of the crowd.
Laurie Kay, the man who was in the cockpit, disagrees: In Hong Kong people wouldn’t turn their heads at something like that, he says, referring to a city where planes commonly fly over at heights that would have South Africans ducking for cover.
Kay, who when he is not flying SAA jumbos, lives surrounded by dogs in a cosy Midrand house, is clearly no daredevil. And the spectacle of an aircraft swooping low over a sports stadium pioneered at last year’s Rugby World Cup final at Ellis Park, and repeated for the Nations Cup would not have happened if there had been the slightest chance of anything going wrong.
Preparation for the Ellis Park fly-past involved the crew spending hours in a flight simulator, and on the big day overflying their route again and again to be sure of crossing the stadium at the very second they were expected.
Needless to say, Ellis Park didn’t feature in the catalogue of computer-generated graphics which can be used in a flight simulator, so they made believe with a graphic of an airport terminal. And the simulator was set to reproduce the worst possible set of flying conditions, so that by the time the real thing happened, it seemed almost routine: The whole thing was so clinical. It was only after we’d landed that we realised we’d become part of the history of the country.
For fear of causing further alarm, Kay is reluctant to divulge the precise height at which the planes went overhead first he hints that the previously quoted figure of 500m is a little high when pressed, he admits that it was closer to 300m.
Besides, Kay believes, the plane wasn’t as close to the ground as it looked: A jumbo covers over an acre of ground, if you measure it from wing-tip to wing-tip and nose to tail. So even if it’s relatively high, it’s still an impressive sight.
At both sports finals, the plane was crawling along at a mere 230km/h. But once again, there was a considerable error margin a jumbo can slow down to less than 180km/h before dropping out of the sky.
The flight over Ellis Park was an idea that grew slowly as SAA brainstormed a way of having a presence at the rugby championship which the airline sponsored.
It started off with people saying why don’t we fly model aeroplanes?’ But they decided that would be too dangerous.
The idea then moved to model helicopters (also too dangerous), then to real helicopters (no, boring, the Air Force was flying helicopters the same day) and then to the idea that would still sound outrageous if it hadn’t already happened: bringing a jumbo in low over the stadium, with the Civil Aviation Authority agreeing to waive its restrictions for the occasion.
Kay describes the flypasts as the most expensive billboard, but the cheapest form of advertising. The Ellis Park jaunt cost SAA about R20 000, and flashed the name of SAA in front of an estimated billion people worldwide. For the soccer final, SAA decided to go one better and added a second plane, an Airbus.
Ellis Park was particularly difficult in that split- second timing was needed so as not to miss the vital TV coverage.
We agreed with the SABC that we’d fly over at 2.31 and 45 seconds. When we asked how much leeway do we have?’ they said there’s no leeway’, Kay recalls. They also asked for two passes, and told us you have 90 seconds between them’. I don’t know if anyone had ever tried to turn around a jumbo in that amount of time.
After that, last Saturday’s run at the FNB stadium seemed like all in a day’s work.