FLY AFRICA – IF YOU CAN’T TAKE THE HEAT GET OUT OF AVIATION!
(Posted 21st November 2015)
Considering the ‘Wagenburg’ mentality the airline’s top management and their mouthpieces have shown in recent days was it no surprise, that when posting searching questions on their Facebook page and challenging them to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, they resorted to the childish measure of blocking this correspondent, making it impossible to do any further posts.
This is in line with prior behaviour, when they first lied about the question if they were operating, when clearly they had no longer an AOC and were effectively grounded by the Zimbabwe Civil Aviation Authority but nevertheless said yes.
They then promptly spoke of this correspondent making wild accusations before threatening to sue, a laughable suggestion when all which was reported here was based on the facts of the case.
Now the airline is continuing to mislead customers when they say: ‘In a welcome judgement issued by the Zimbabwe High Court on Tuesday 17 November, flyafrica Zimbabwe won its legal case that found local partner Chakanyuka Karase had acted illegally and with malicious intent to damage the airline by seeking to ground flyafrica Zimbabwe. We have begun work on restarting the airline and are working with the regulators to resume flights on Tuesday 24 November. We will update everyone as soon as we have more information’ when all the court did was granting an injunction against the local partner not to interfere in their business until the main case is heard.
The court also told the airline, something the airline is clearly shy to share, to put their house in order after accepting a report from the Zimbabwe CAA over various regulation violations, as reported in great detail here in earlier editions.
Justice Tsanga clearly said in her ruling that while the letter from the local shareholder to the CAAZ was damaging, it was merely exposing the chaos in the organization: ‘Whilst the letter by Mr. Karase was damaging, it was in the sense exposing the depth of the problems that applicant was facing. This was against the added backdrop of what emerged to CAAZ as being compounded (by) its management impasse, which it could not simply overlook in terms of safety implications’ did the court say.
So why is Fly Africa acting the way they are if, as they suggest, they won their case (Ahem) and have nothing to hide?
The questions posed to Adrian Hamilton-Manns were straight forward, asking: as ‘How many tickets has Fly Africa sold for flights within, from and to Zimbabwe since the 28th of October? How many refunds for such tickets affected by the flight ban have been processed so far? Have you now finally stopped selling tickets until CAAZ has restored the AOC? When will the airline provide full disclosure about what was known when?
Not telling the full truth and trying to shoot the messengers is clearly not a behaviour airlines should be allowed to get away with as it suggests they are hiding things from the public, which in the aviation business raises all sorts of alarm bells. The court’s mention of ‘safety implications’ is a grave matter, as is taking money for tickets in a flash and then hiding behind technicalities to not effect an equally prompt refund. Passengers are rightly outraged that they should wait for 30 or 40 days to get their money back, apart from the apparently appalling service they received from the airline as many comments on the Facebook page of Fly Africa continue to attest to.
It can only be hoped that the Zimbabwe Civil Aviation, in full exercise of its powers, will ensure that the Fly Africa AOC is only returned when all their concerns have been addressed, in order to protect the travelling public from what falls under the broad meaning of ‘safety implications’- apart of course from the issue of refunds for which many passengers have been waiting since the airline was grounded over three weeks ago. Keep watching this space for future updates, as and when new developments can be reported.
