Flying in South Africa

While in Johannesburg on a business trip I had free time over the
weekend so I found a local GA operator and went flying. I flew with
http://www.skyafrica.com out of Brakpan-Benoni airfield (in the shadow
of Joburg International)

If you're ever in this part of the world, I highly recommend it. I put
up an album of pictures at http://tinyurl.com/tjz3b.

I flew with Karl, the owner and a CFI. He knows the area like the back
of his hand and handled the radios and navigation, so I just flew,
looked out the window,and took pictures (after handing the controls
over to Karl). We also did some low-level flying in the Waterberge
range. Actually Karl did, I would not dare to fly that low in an area
I didn't know. He's a very experienced bush pilot (most important tip:
when flying low, fly fast so you can always pull up and climb in a
hurry if you "get in the ****.")

Very beautiful scenery, and well worth the ZAR1408 an hour wet with
instructor for a C-172SP. That's about $190/hr. I was scheduled to fly
the C-172 but it was down for maint so we flew the PA28-235 and they
gave me the 172 rate because it wasn't my fault we changed planes. I
was very impressed with the level of professionalism and maintenance.
They are a serious bush operator and have trained a lot of pilots who
are now flying Cessna Caravans for the UN in Sudan and similar. As a
matter of fact, many African bush operators send their pilots to Karl
for his intense 9-day bush class.

I also had a several interesting conversations about flying with Karl.
He said that the best GA pilots come from the US, Australia, and South
Africa. (my guess is that may be because those are relatively advanced
countries where flying is relatively cheap, so people can afford to
train for more hours). He also told me that most of the flight crew on
Asian airlines come from Australia and South Africa, which squares with
my experience. I heard a lot of Aussie accents and clearly English
names making announcements from the flight deck of Cathay Pacific
flights.

a story along those lines. I've been generally staying at hotels where
flight crews stay. Yesterday an Emirates 777 crew came in. The flight
attendents were distinctive in their modest dress, red skirts below the
ankle with large flowing white scarves covering their hair and pillbox
hats on top. I didn't notice the flight crew as much because they
dressed in standard flight crew uniforms. I got into the elevator with
the captain, with his name tag in Arabic and his baggage covered with
Emirates stickers and politely asked him how long they were in town.
It was quite unexpected with the response came back with a VERY
Australian accent "24 hours, mate". Not what you would expect from an
Emirates crew. Oh and one of those Arab dressed flight attendents went
into the room next door to me and came out later for ice transformed
into an Aussie sheila.

I'm starting to think the Aussies are doing all the airline flying in
this part of the world. Lucky *******s.