Four Years, One A320, One 737 and a R21 Million Bill

By Garth Calitz

FlySafair takes SAA Technical to court after an Airbus A320 broke loose during a tow and collided with a parked Boeing 737 at OR Tambo

There are few things more reassuring at an international airport than watching an aircraft being towed. The engines are shut down, the passengers are safely nowhere near it, the aircraft isn't flying anywhere under its own power and a tug is doing the hard work. It should, in theory, be one of the least dramatic activities taking place on an airport ramp. Unfortunately, at O.R. Tambo International Airport in November 2022, that theory met reality rather abruptly when an SAA Airbus A320 being towed towards a maintenance facility broke loose from its tug and collided with a parked FlySafair Boeing 737-800. Almost four years later, the incident has developed into an R21.1 million damages claim by Safair against SAA Technical.

The legal action, filed in the Johannesburg High Court on 2 September 2026, relates to the incident of 11 November 2022. According to Safair's court papers, the Airbus was being towed by an SAA Technical employee while another employee was in the cockpit "riding the brakes". The tow operation apparently went wrong when the shear pin on the towing equipment failed, allowing the A320 to break away from the tug and move beyond its intended path. The tug driver reportedly managed to move clear and attempted to warn his colleague, but Safair alleges that the Airbus was not stopped in time and subsequently struck the parked Boeing 737. The result was a very expensive example of what happens when an aircraft that is supposed to be moving in one direction but goes off script.

Safair's claim alleges that the personnel involved failed to maintain proper control of the Airbus after the towing equipment failed and that the employee in the cockpit did not react appropriately to the warning from the tug operator. Safair further alleges that the brakes were not applied in time to prevent the collision. These remain allegations contained in the airline's court papers and have yet to be tested by the court. SAA Technical has not yet filed its formal defence, meaning there are still two sides to this story and, as is generally the case when lawyers become involved, considerably more paperwork to come.

What is not particularly disputable is the physical result. The A320's wing collided with the Safair Boeing 737-800, causing sufficient damage to take the Boeing out of commercial service while repairs were undertaken. The aircraft may have been stationary, but financially it was about to embark on a very long and expensive journey.

According to Safair's claim, the damaged 737 was unavailable for commercial operations from 1 December to 22 December 2022. That period covered the beginning of the South African summer holiday season, which is traditionally not the ideal time for an airline to discover that one of its aircraft has unexpectedly become an expensive aluminium sculpture on the ground. Safair says the Boeing had been scheduled to operate 132 domestic flight sectors during that period, with a potential capacity of 189 passengers per sector.

On Safair's calculations, those scheduled flights represented almost 25,000 available seats. Based on its actual average load factor, the airline estimates that approximately 24,070 seats would have been sold. It is these lost commercial opportunities, together with the other losses claimed by Safair, that form the basis of the R21.1 million damages claim. In other words, the cost of the accident wasn't confined to repairing a damaged Boeing. Every day that aircraft remained unavailable potentially represented another day of lost revenue, disrupted schedules and capacity that had to be replaced elsewhere in the airline's operation.

This is where a relatively mundane ground-handling incident becomes a serious commercial matter. An aircraft sitting on the ground may not be burning jet fuel, but it can still be costing an airline money at a remarkable rate. The engines might be silent, but the spreadsheet is screaming.

Safair isn't simply seeking compensation for the physical damage to its aircraft. Its claim is based on consequential losses allegedly resulting from the Boeing being unavailable for service. The airline's argument is essentially that if the collision resulted from negligence on the part of SAA Technical's employees, then SAA Technical should be responsible not only for the immediate damage but also for the financial consequences that followed.

That is obviously where the case becomes considerably more complicated. It is one thing to establish that two aircraft collided; it is another to establish precisely who was legally responsible, whether the actions or omissions alleged by Safair amounted to negligence, what losses were directly caused by the incident and whether all of those losses are recoverable under South African law. Those questions are now for the court to consider. The R21.1 million figure is therefore a claim, not a judgment, and SAA Technical has yet to present its formal defence.

That distinction is worth maintaining because aviation accidents tend to produce wonderfully simple stories in the first few hours. Somebody did something, something broke and something hit something else. Then the lawyers arrive and discover that there are approximately 47 different ways of interpreting the same five seconds of activity.

The incident also highlights something that is sometimes overlooked by people outside aviation: moving an aircraft around an airport can be every bit as safety-critical as operating it in flight. Aircraft towing operations involve heavy equipment, complex procedures, multiple people, radio communication, brake control and very expensive machinery being moved within relatively confined spaces. The aircraft may be travelling at walking pace, but an A320 still weighs tens of tonnes and does not have the manners of a shopping trolley when something goes wrong.

That is precisely why towing procedures exist. Equipment can fail. Shear pins can break. Communications can be misunderstood. Personnel can make mistakes. The safety system has to anticipate those possibilities and ensure that a single failure does not become an accident. The critical question in this case will therefore not simply be why the towing equipment failed, but what happened after it failed and whether the people involved did everything reasonably expected of them to prevent the Airbus from reaching the Boeing.

The irony is that aviation spends enormous amounts of money designing aircraft systems with multiple layers of redundancy so that one component failure doesn't become a disaster. Then, occasionally, something goes wrong on the ground and everyone discovers that the same philosophy should apply to towing procedures too.

The accident happened in November 2022. The Boeing was repaired and returned to service; the immediate operational disruption eventually ended, and life at OR Tambo moved on. But the financial consequences apparently didn't disappear quite as quickly. Safair says settlement discussions have already taken place but failed to resolve the dispute, leading to the current High Court action. The airline has also indicated that it remains open to mediation, which may yet provide an opportunity for the two sides to settle the matter without proceeding through a full trial.

There is something almost wonderfully South African about an aircraft collision that lasted seconds turning into a legal process measured in years. The A320 has long since returned to the skies, the 737 has plenty more sectors behind it, and yet the paperwork generated by their brief encounter continues to fly. Somewhere in a filing cabinet, computer server or legal archive, the 2022 tow is still very much alive.

Perhaps aircraft aren't the only things in aviation with remarkably long endurance.

For airlines operating on tight schedules, aircraft availability is everything. A commercial aircraft is not simply a machine; it is an income-generating asset that may be scheduled several times a day. Take one aircraft out of the fleet and the airline has to find replacement capacity, move passengers, adjust schedules and absorb the resulting costs. What looks like a simple accident involving two aircraft can therefore ripple through an entire operation.

That is why ground safety deserves the same seriousness as flight safety. Nobody would accept a pilot saying that the aircraft "just went that way" after an incident in the air. The same principle should apply when an aircraft is being moved on the ground.

It is entirely possible that the final amount, if anything is ultimately awarded, will be very different from the figure being claimed. Courts have a rather annoying habit of examining evidence before deciding who gets paid. But regardless of the eventual outcome, the case demonstrates just how quickly a seemingly routine ground operation can turn into a multimillion-rand event.

There is a delicious irony in the fact that two major South African passenger aircraft managed to collide while neither was actually flying. There was no weather problem, no turbulence, no bird strike, no unstable approach and no runway excursion. There wasn't even a passenger on board the Airbus to complain about the service. There was simply a towing operation that went wrong, an A320 that apparently didn't stop when it needed to, and a Boeing 737 that happened to be in an extremely inconvenient place.

If Safair succeeds, the lesson will be brutally straightforward: when you damage someone else's aircraft, the aircraft may eventually be repaired, but the invoice can have considerably greater endurance. If SAA Technical successfully defends the claim, the case will demonstrate an equally important point: a mechanical failure during a towing operation does not automatically establish liability for every subsequent loss claimed by the other party.

Either way, the case deserves attention because it is about considerably more than one damaged Boeing. It is about ground handling, safety procedures, responsibility and the extraordinary financial consequences that can follow from a few seconds of lost control. Perhaps there is one final lesson for everyone working around aircraft at OR Tambo and elsewhere.

Aircraft are expensive enough when they're flying. There really is no need to use them as bumper cars on the ground. Especially when the bumper car is an Airbus A320, the other vehicle is a Boeing 737, and somebody eventually sends you a bill for R21.1 million.