Is it as bad as they claim?
Darren Olivier – Defence Editor
Reflections on Inkwazi
Inkwazi, the South African Air Force’s Boeing Business Jet (BBJ) used for VIP transport, has been reliably racking up the flying hours this year. In just the past two weeks before writing this column it flew President Ramaphosa tens of thousands of kilometres in back to back trips to Switzerland, Poland, Russia, and now France without a single hitch or serious snag and quick turnaround between missions.
Yet it wasn’t that long ago that the South African Presidency and Minister of Defence under the Zuma administration were deriding the BBJ as ‘unreliable’, ‘unsafe’, ‘too old’, and in urgent need of replacement as it was supposedly no longer up to the job of transporting the president.
Between 2011 and 2017 there were numerous attempts to lease or acquire costly new aircraft to replace it, and the frequent and unnecessary use of chartered aircraft in its place. At the same time a wide group of commentators, self-proclaimed experts, and praise-singers were echoing those arguments in opinion pieces, on social media posts, and in appearances on radio and TV. All are now silent on the matter, with the ‘unreliability’ of the BBJ and purported urgency of replacing it entirely forgotten. None have ever walked back or apologised for their statements.
As the public, we should not be allowing our politicians, commentators, and other public figures to conveniently forget about all this, and we should keep it in mind every time there’s a similar debate around acquisitions, requirements, and security for VIP travel. Once bitten, twice shy, and scepticism should be the public’s default position after all the attempts to mislead it.
After all, the first serious attempt to make these arguments and replace the BBJ (and the rest of the VIP fleet) came as early as 2010, soon after Jacob Zuma became president, when the BBJ was just 10 years old. Clearly the argument could not be made that the BBJ was too old, so instead the then Defence Minister Lindiwe Sisulu argued in an internal memo published by the Mail & Guardian that: “One aircraft for intercontinental presidential travel is woefully inadequate.” And that: “In the event that the BBJ is unserviceable or in servicing, there is not another kind of aircraft that is able to fulfil presidential air transport requirements.”
As a result, an attempt was made to acquire a fleet of six brand new dedicated VIP aircraft: Two Boeing 767s for the exclusive use of the president, two BBJs for the deputy president, and two Challenger or Global XRS-sized business jets for ‘former presidents and ministers’. Notably, this was not reportedly preceded by the defined Department of Defence requirements gathering and determination process, such as a Staff Target, a Staff Requirement, a User Requirement Specification, and so on.
That plan presumably came up against the cold hard reality of National Treasury’s beancounters, as the total package would have easily cost R10 billion when including the cost of fitting VVIP interiors.
The focus then shifted toward leasing, perhaps as a way to hide the exorbitant costs inside the SANDF’s operational budget, and the early 2011 agreement with AdoAir of an R800 million five year lease of two Embraer Lineage 1000s. This was, however, done before approval of the department’s legal team had been received, and the Secretary of Defence, Mpumi Mpofu, as the department’s accounting officer refused to sign off. The department had no choice but to cancel the deal, but soon tried to replace it with another one with Execujet for a second Boeing Business Jet and a Global Express XRS. That, too, fell through. Later in 2011 both Mpumi Mpofu, as Secretary of Defence, and Lt Gen Carlo Gagiano, the Chief of the Air Force, tendered their resignations over the VVIP transport situation. Gagiano’s was not accepted.
AdoAir in the interim sued for damages of R200 million, related to costs accrued to source the aircraft following the signing of the agreement. The case was settled in an out of court settlement a year later, by which time Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula had replaced Sisulu as Minister of Defence. She had though initially contested the case and argued in filed court papers that no payment was due to AdorAir as the entire contract was irregular.
She also soon picked up where her predecessor left off, and in 2012 the South African media reported that the Department of Defence had entered into an initial agreement to acquire a VVIP Boeing 777-200 LR for the president and a Bombardier Global Express 6000 for the deputy president, at a cost of several billion Rand. The agreement lapsed before approval could be received from all relevant departments.
Mapisa-Nqakula continued making a strident case for a new presidential aircraft, saying in 2013: “Every week without fail, we pay millions of rand chartering aircraft for strategic airlift capability, which far exceeds the money we would have spent by purchasing… If you look at some of our aircraft, they’re 60 to 62 years old and should be museum pieces and we use them to ferry our people around… I won’t elaborate on some of the experiences I’ve had and what I’ve seen happening, but this process must begin.”
Yet those were all statements that applied to the Air Force’s aged transport fleets, not to the VVIP aircraft of 21 Squadron, and it was clear that the acquisition of a new VVIP aircraft had priority over new medium and light transport aircraft.
In 2015 a new acquisition plan, Project MOAGI, was set up and Armscor issued a tender for a new VVIP aircraft, specifying that it would have to be capable of carrying 30 passengers in a VIP configuration over a distance of 13 800 km without stopping to refuel and with the usual safety reserves. That requirement alone meant that only a handful of aircraft, such as the Boeing 747, 777 and 787 and the Airbus A330, A350 and A340, had the size and range to meet it. It also meant a likely minimum cost of R3.2 billion for the aircraft if acquired new, as the cheapest aircraft on that list cost over $220 million in their base configurations, and fitting a VIP interior would have added approximately another $100 million, or R1.4 billion based on similar examples. All in all, a price tag of R4 billion was highly plausible.
The public outcry was immediate and widespread, causing the government to back down slightly and attempt to justify it. However two notable snags with Inkwazi, the first a leaking fuel pipe detected in Doha, Qatar that meant one of the external fuel tanks could not be used, and the second an overplayed technical problem on the ground in Burundi, provided an excuse to claim that the aircraft was unsafe and needed to be replaced.
For months President Zuma flew only on chartered aircraft, in particular a Super 27 owned by Paramount’s Fortune Air, even though the BBJ was perfectly serviceable. Media reports at the time claimed that the president feared ‘sabotage’, and the personnel at 21 Squadron came under intense, unwelcome, and unpleasant scrutiny.
It was all the reasoning Mapisa-Nqakula needed to justify a new aircraft. At Africa Aerospace & Defence 2016 she insisted that a new VVIP aircraft would be procured within the next eighteen months, and that Inkwazi was unsafe and could not be used: “There are issues with it. It’s 15 years old. Three years ago it was flying 300 hours annually, now it flies 600 hours. The need for a replacement is urgent and is non-negotiable.”
It was only the victory of Zuma’s opponent within the party, Cyril Ramaphosa, at a party conference in late 2017 and his appointment as president of South Africa in early 2018 that ended the hunt for a new aircraft. While Project MOAGI remains current, there is not currently any serious funding allocated or urgency driving it. After a period of work to restore lapsed maintenance contracts and restore the BBJ to flight, it was brought back into use and has proven reliable since.
It’s true that the BBJ has not had a completely trouble-free service life, with the occasional snag disrupting proceedings and the odd incident including the two mentioned before. However, it would be unrealistic to expect that any aircraft would be any different. They’re complex machines, and even with the best maintenance, snags will happen. But it speaks well of the reliability of the aircraft and the excellent work done by the SAAF’s technical staff that there have been so few problems over the past 20 years and that none was ever a serious safety issue, given how frequently and extensively it has been used.
At times the BBJ has also been unavailable for reasons that have nothing to do with the aircraft itself, but rather poor planning, mistakes by airport personnel, or local regulations. For instance, last year it was out of service for months longer than planned while undergoing a C-Check, as there were delays caused by SAA Technical’s difficulties with conducting its first such procedure on a BBJ.
Previously C-Checks and D-Checks had been conducted at Jet Aviation in Switzerland, the OEM for the BBJ’s interior, but in line with an Armscor and SAAF push for local suppliers, the work was contracted to SAA Technical. Later in the year the aircraft was grounded again when the regular tender for Jeppesen navigation data was not completed in time owing to a dispute and mix-up between the Department of Defence and National Treasury. And most recently it was out of action for a month or two after Cape Town International Airport ground staff towed it to the wrong position in a hangar and damaged the vertical tail on an overhead beam.
For both planned and unplanned periods of unavailability the Air Force has the option of chartering, where it benefits from the availability of a relatively large number of suitable private jets on the South African register. In the past this was usually done via the National Treasury’s RT61 transversal contract, which consists of pre-approved and pre-vetted providers and aircraft. As long as this option is used for genuine instances where the Air Force’s aircraft are not available it’s a cost-effective alternative to having more aircraft in service.
There will also come a time when it does make proper financial and operational sense to replace the BBJ. Arguably, that point has already been reached for the Dassault Falcon 900B and Falcon 50s that make up the rest of 21 Squadron’s VIP fleet. When that happens, it might make more sense to avoid acquiring another dedicated set of VIP aircraft and instead look to follow the example set by other countries of having modular and removable VIP interiors for long range strategic transports, like the A330 MRTT or perhaps the smaller KC-390. That would provide a boost to the Air Force’s operational capabilities, in particular restoring the air refuelling capability lost when the 707s retired, while also meeting VIP transport requirements.