OR Tambo fuel snag could claim a political casualty, Mbalula hints

Airports Company SA (Acsa) management has admitted that it was caught flat-footed by a fuel system breakdown on December 29 that led to 41 domestic and international flights being delayed.

While Acsa counts the cost, the embarrassing failure of a fuel valve at the main storage tank farm that feeds into the apron continues to reverberate. That system is part of a major upgrade planned for over the next 36 months. A major valve gear jammed and led to the system being unable to pump Jet fuel to the awaiting aircraft on the apron.

Senior management scrambled to find a solution, but found that their risk planning was woefully short of options.

At the same time, transport minister Fikile Mbalula said he is now under personal pressure after the day-long delays and on the cusp of departing from the government.

Speaking at a media conference at OR Tambo on Tuesday 2nd January 2023,  Mbalula dropped hints that he may be on the way out.

Shortages

“My Twitter account is doing wonders for this country, you will miss me,” he said amid journalists’ laughter. Asked when he was leaving, he said: “That is coming, it is not a problem, take it as given, it’s coming.”

Mbalula refused to provide more details about his possible departure, but pressure on the department of transport has grown over the last few months as aviation fuel challenges mount.

Apart from flood damaging a crucial pipeline, shortages have been created by a combination of factors including supply chain hiccups.

While the minister remained coy about his future, Acsa CEO Mpumi Mpofu told journalists at the media conference that her team responded as quickly as possible to the outage. But she said the incident prompted a rethink about the airport’s infrastructure plans.

“We have all the mitigation measures in place but more importantly we have taken a decision to run all our projects on a parallel basis and bring them to a much speedier implementation,” Mpofu said.

She defended her management team, saying that the post-Covid-19 era had the operation up to around 95% of its capability.

While she pointed out that the escalators, lifts and parking areas were operating at close to previous sustained highs, a more critical area is the delivery of systems directly to the aircraft. Any changes in these have an immediate and financial effect on the airlines, and passengers.

However, she said that outage caused by a faulty fuel valve had a major effect on all airlines operating both into and out of SA. “The first flights between 6am and 9am could not take off and that is what caused a knock-on effect throughout the day and every single flight being delayed.”

Airlines often expect to turn their planes around in 15 minutes to half an hour on the domestic routes, particularly the Johannesburg to Cape Town sector. It took more than 12 hours to bring most flights back onto schedule as 41 domestic and international flights were affected, and the cost is thought to run into millions of rand. Acsa is collecting data and Mpofu said she would be able to release the final figures of the cost in the third week of January 2023.

Acsa group executive for strategy and sustainability Charles Shilowa said the risk management process was upended by the valve failure. A project on the drawing board focuses on the ageing pipeline and parts, and he said his aim is to shift cash towards the refurbishment of existing infrastructure rather than spending on new capex.

“In systems like we have, we have a problem with that pipeline and we were in a process of making sure it is replaced,” said Shilowa. The pandemic had knocked their plans off track.

“Unfortunately when Covid hit us, it sort of created a situation where, you know, there were limited funds and we had to restrict spending money on new capex.”

The airport could only supply a handful of planes with fuel through the use of a single tanker that was shuttling back and forth from the tanks. This was one of the embarrassing facts that emerged from the media conference.

Mbalula promised that the fuel crisis issue has been dealt with as an emergency strategy. “We have passed the crisis mode and all airlines will not suffer the same situation as we embark on a mitigation process... this was literally an accident,” he said.

“We are happy to report that all those issues are a thing of the past as we have managed two stabilise jet fuels stock levels at all our airports to ensure that we have sufficient to comfortably meet demand.”

With the main surge of travellers returning from their annual holidays seen to start on Friday January 5, the system is expected to come under even more pressure but Acsa officials said they now have redundancy in place at OR Tambo to cope with any future breakdown of fuel flow.