Speaker, I would like to thank hon Farrow. I was hoping that someone would ask this question. It is important that we don't just look at the good things, but also take note of some of the challenges that we had in the course of hosting the World Cup.
Yes, indeed the problems at King Shaka International Airport were caused not by unscheduled or nonscheduled flights that didn't have flight plans, but by a backlog that built up as a result of the semifinal being held here, the evening before, in Cape Town. A whole host of VIP jets - basically business-type jets - left Cape Town International Airport late, and therefore arrived late at the other end, at King Shaka Airport. This thing caused a problematic knock-on effect.
Basically, as the hon member correctly says, schedules or flight times were allocated to these aircraft, but the VIPs involved failed to pitch up in time and flights were delayed by a matter of an hour, two hours and so forth. I think that the Air Traffic Navigation Services, ATNS, Airports Company SA, ACSA, and the responsible authorities were faced with a predicament: They could block those VIPs - some of them from Fifa, for instance - from flying and attending, but that would have created an international scandal, in that it would seem that we were not able to provide transport to them.
We had hoped that we could then still be able to slot in these scheduled aircraft - SAA, SA Airways, and others - flying from, for instance, Johannesburg into the airport.
This problem was then compounded by the fact that, apart from leaving late and therefore causing a backlog, there was also a defiance of instructions from the airport to move the aircraft from King Shaka to the old Durban International Airport. There was basically defiance in some cases.
Then there were attempts to shift some of those aircraft off onto another section to create space in the airport, but the engineers advised us against doing that because some parts of the very extensive King Shaka International Airport have reinforced concrete that had not yet settled. It apparently needs some six months.
So what we were using was fine, and had settled over a six months', or whatever it was, period. There were other parts which potentially could have been used, but which might then have suffered structural damage if we had moved aircraft onto them.
Also, the final problem was that the SA Air Force had declared no-fly zones over the stadiums in the course of matches, and in the period preceding and following matches as well. Because of the backlog, it then became increasingly difficult to use King Shaka Airport. [Time expired.]