- FlySafair hasn’t noted an incident at the weekend involving FA212 on its official press portal or social media.
- Instead, the airline directs users to a statement located on News24 which is locked behind a paywall.
- Thankfully, all passengers are safe and no injuries were sustained from the incident.
Sunday was quite the day for passengers aboard a FlySafair flight from Johannesburg to Cape Town, not that you’d know about it unless you were online on Sunday morning or have your X timeline set to For You.
While taking off, ground staff at OR Tambo International Airport spotted damage to flight FA212’s rear tyre. After the flight crew was informed, the aircraft returned to the airport nearly two hours later according to reports.
Despite the damaged tyre, the passengers and crew all landed safely with no injuries reported. Many on social media have praised the crew and pilot for ensuring that the passengers returned to the ground safely but we have to make mention of an issue here.
FlySafair has not made a statement available to the public. Instead, it directs South Africans to a News24 article. As you may be aware, access to News24 articles is dependent on a subscription.
As the commenter in the X thread above states, FlySafair hasn’t published any sort of official statement about the incident on its X profile or any other social media channels.
What about the airline’s press office? That too is devoid of any statement, the last being from 20th February 2024 about interior designs.
We contacted FlySafair on X and we were directed to the paywalled article. When asked why the statement was put behind a paywall, the person operating the account under the moniker BC, was confused as to why the article was behind a paywall. We have emailed FlySafair to find out why it wasn’t aware articles on News24 are behind a paywall.
The silence from the firm and its direction to a pay-walled statement is incredibly alarming given the state of air travel at the moment.
Earlier this year, the spotlight was placed on Boeing after a cabin panel detached from an Alaskan Airlines journey, mid-flight. Earlier this month a whistleblower urged the manufacturer to ground every 787 Dreamliner owing to the a number of concerns they had.
“The entire fleet worldwide, as far as I’m concerned right now, needs attention. And the attention is, you need to check your gaps and make sure that you don’t have potential for premature failure,” Boeing engineer, Sam Salehpour told NBC.
The aircraft manufacturer was seemingly unperturbed by this warning.
“We are fully confident in the 787 Dreamliner because of the comprehensive work done to ensure the quality and long-term safety of the aircraft. These claims about the structural integrity of the 787 are inaccurate,” Boeing said.
FlySafair messed up here. The firm should have – and still can – place it’s statement on its social channels for everybody to read instead of leaning on Media24 and its pay-walled articles as a way to keep this incident from spreading unabated.
We understand that reputationally, this is bad and with so few airlines left in South Africa, it’s understandable that a company would want to downplay an incident involving an aircraft flying its livery.
But sweeping this under the rug in this way only serves to make FlySafair look like it wants South Africa to forget that this incident even happened. See, their planes have interior designs made by locals guys, don’t worry about thorough inspections and the technical stuff.
While we suspect that FlySafair had its customer’s best interests at heart and all precautions were taken, we can’t say for sure because we don’t have a News24 subscription.
Silence is becoming an alarming trend in South Africa. Anecdotally speaking we have to wait upwards of 24 hours for statements from companies and when we receive these statements, all too often are they hollow and devoid of much information. This is worse when dealing with the local arm of an international firm such as Uber where requests need to go through several layers of employees before reaching the intended person.
We really need more transparency from local companies, and not just when lawmakers and authorities come knocking for answers.
Do better FlySafair.
