On Saturday, pilots flying for Airlink did a thing over the Cape Town stadium.

It was a dashing spectacle of precise angles, speed, weight, and engine force that saw one of the two E190 Embraers cross the roof of the stadium by four and a quarter Eben Etzebeths.

Airlink is a national treasure, founded 35 years ago and led for 33 of those by Rodger Foster. Foster married the post-isolation burgeoning tourism with affordable, reliable, and pleasant aviation. Our magnificent safari reserves owe the guy more than they could ever express.

The crowd attending the match between the Springboks and the All Blacks was left delirious by the flyover. It was a nice thing in a land where nice stuff is in danger of being throttled by bizarre rulings from the Constitutional Court, or pressure from international NGOs. In the breathless accounts of those moments, a sense of gratitude: thank you, pilots Hendrik or Jabu or Sbu or Sanette or Danie or Precious. That was exhilarating.

Unfortunately, these feelings were not echoed by the world’s legacy media titles and other commentators for whom the brilliant pilots’ feats were just a bit too close. Through the course of Sunday, the chattering increased until the conclusion spelled itself out: what happened in Cape Town was reckless, dangerous, and not to be repeated.

Most of these people have probably never spent enough time in the country to know that the flyover is emblematic of its people. Game for a (calculated) dare. A little bit mad. To hell with scaredy cats. We like this, we’ve been doing it a long time – and we’ll continue.

Worst Take

One of the worst of all takes didn’t come from Europe, but rather from a South African who thinks like a modish European. Redi Thlabi declared that we should pause flyovers as “there are some powerful countries who want to destabilise South Africa”. Presumably she means America, and perhaps with the usual “Jooooooos” to boot. If the Daily Maverick wishes to persist with the services of a 9/11 truther, well, good luck to them, but cheerfully not everyone has had their mind polluted by spending hours in a dark room with former Mail & Guardian editor Phillip van Niekerk.

“It was highly dangerous,” was a comment made by Greg Bagwell, a former Royal Air Force Senior Commander – to nods from local media. Thanks for that, Greg, but we’ve done way more dangerous, damaging things, which have actually hurt people – without a squeak of condemnation from Englishmen. For example, we use race in our employment criteria and have subsequently lost acres of talent to hospitals and engineering firms and municipalities across the world. We never took violent, orchestrated crime seriously, something that has ended up impacting the most impoverished and vulnerable. As for risks, well, MTN’s activities in the Middle East should qualify there. Perhaps Redi and Phillip can talk about that one next time.

If It Had Happened in Britain

Had the same exercise been attempted in today’s Yookay, the sequence would resemble as follows:

The organisers apply alongside the sponsor airline, which has mapped the technicalities. Immediately they receive an automatic response from the United Kingdom Civil Aviation Authority explaining that their request will be attended to within a government-mandated 60 days. When the applicants respond with “no good” (given that the event is weeks away) and request expedience, a big boned be-lanyarded woman intervenes to thank them – again – and commits to compiling commentary of all the regulation and compliance NPCs (non-playable characters – establishment automatons with no thoughts of their own) within, say, 120 days. Within the applicant party is someone admirably persistent, and this person manages to get hold of an executive within the authority who then commits to prioritising the request within a week. But nobody hears from them, so the idea is scrapped.

Two years later, a PDF of 900 pages from the authority drops into the inbox of the applicants. “We are sorry,” it starts, “but after much reflection and input from stakeholders, we just can’t approve.”

Risk aversion is an accelerant to decline. In the matrix of everything sterile and crap, the health and safety industrial complex sits just above diversity training, so shares many of its destructive features, the principal among which being everything must be policed, monitored, measured, reported on. On office floors across Europe, the fixture of the yellow- or orange-jacketed fire marshal – HR Karen’s predecessor – charged with leading an evacuation in the event of a fire alarm laid the platform to make everything worse. Today they have courses at the British Broadcasting Corporation on how to hold a hot drink.

Australians would have done something like this, but in the now-distant era of crocodile wrangler and explorer Malcolm Douglas. Today, with Anthony Albanese and his free-speech demon Chris Minns (New South Wales Premier) – not a chance. The Canadians? Never, and besides, they’re way too into things like welcome-to-country as a feature of sporting clashes. Similarly, an Irish pilot in the 1980s with a few fingers of whiskey in him may have possessed the minerals, but these days that lot are too busy bullying Jewish people. As for the French, their idea of preludes was captured in the menacing spectacles of a charging white horse (as an introduction to the four horsemen of the apocalypse) and a transgender desecrating the Last Supper by stuffing its face with cake.

If we’re barred from having fun through methodically analysed risks, then we’ll end up with the country the (mostly white) activist, media, and academic classes want – a perpetually middling Euro state, but without the cash, bicycles, or cheese. Airbagging our attitudes toward safety, like wokeness, would be the one of most unnatural states for the country to exist in.