Invictus - Carlin [100]
Often enough Mandela was charming for charm’s sake. Quite often, too, he sought to receive something in exchange. Sometimes it was purely personal; other times it was political. This time Mandela had a specific favor to ask. “He explained that the rest of his delegation were in economy and he wished to see if they could be upgraded.” Kay did not hesitate. “I immediately gave the order that they be taken upstairs to First.”
Mandela had obviously manipulated him. Yet Kay’s understanding that this had been the case in no way tempered his admiration, partly because, as he said, “You should see some of the cold, supercilious, arrogant types you get in first class! But it went deeper. From that day on I changed forever. He’s a magician, no doubt about it. In my mind there is an aura about certain people. Eugene Terreblanche: I walked out to an airplane alongside him once. He had an aura of evil. Mandela has an aura of goodness.”
Kay’s and Mandela’s paths collided one more time—or they very nearly did—on the day of the Rugby World Cup final.
South African Airways had begun conversations with the rugby union a few weeks earlier to see if there was some way they might extract some marketing advantage from the big event. At first, discussions centered around the notion of getting a small radio-controlled plane with the SAA colors to flyover the stadium. But as the talks progressed the plans became more ambitious, until Kay received a call from an SAA executive asking him if he might be persuaded to fly a 747 jumbo jet on the afternoon of the final match with the words “Go Bokke” (the Afrikaans plural) painted on the plane’s underbelly. Kay did not think twice about it. If Mandela had been preparing all his life for this moment, so had he. Not only was he the airline’s most experienced 747 pilot, he had spent thirty years as a stunt flyer. He did air acrobatics shows and had even done a turn once in a film starring the Hong Kong martial arts actor Jackie Chan.
The difference this time was that it was not only himself he would be exposing to grave danger. Nor only the 62,000 people inside the stadium but countless more outside. For Ellis Park sat inside the Johannesburg city bowl. All around were residential buildings and office towers.
Laurie Kay spent the week before the final diligently preparing for what would be the most outrageous flyover in history. He, the civil aviation people, and the city authorities, now under the command of the new provincial premier, the charismatic former Robben Islander Tokyo Sexwale, held numerous meetings during the week before the final. “We installed a military air traffic control center on the roof of Ellis Park and declared the sky for five nautical miles around the stadium ‘sterile,’ meaning it was a no-fly zone, on the day of the match,” Kay said. He and his colleagues at South African Airlines also had to confer with the SABC, who were broadcasting the event live around the world, to make sure that the flyover occurred at precisely the right moment for maximum TV exposure. “They said they wanted me to fly past at exactly 2.32 p.m. and 45 seconds. That was doable. But then they said I had to fly over a second time within ninety seconds. This stumped me, because I did not know if I could maneuver a plane so big so quickly.