The thin line between doubt and awe

Base Photo Credit: Airlink Facebook Page

I was in the stadium on Saturday. We're used to flyovers at big rugby matches in South Africa. We've seen the helicopters, the big aircraft, the flag trailing behind. We know the drill. This wasn't that.

Two Airlink aircraft glided over DHL Stadium and took the whole thing to another level.

It was a showstopper. And, ridiculously, it wasn't even the highlight of the afternoon.

That's how spoilt we are. Because the Bokke did pretty much the same thing.

Just when you think you know what South African rugby looks like, they find another gear.

By Sunday, the flyover was being dissected from every possible angle. Too low. Too close. Dangerous. Reckless. Who approved this?

Those are legitimate questions. Aviation has rules for very good reasons. But another question occurred to me.

What if these guys were just really good?

Not lucky. Not cowboys. Not ag, only in South Africa. Good.

There is a psychological concept called the availability heuristic. We tend to build our picture of reality from the examples most readily available to us. And in South Africa, incompetence is extremely available. It's on the front page. In our feeds. In parliamentary hearings. In municipal failures. In another story about something that should work but doesn't.

We have become so well trained at spotting the failure that excellence can look suspicious.

South Africa has a serious aviation history. The South African Air Force dates back to 1920, our wartime flying schools trained thousands of aircrew, and over the decades the country built deep capability in aircraft manufacturing, engineering, maintenance and pilot training. Aviation skill here is not new.

So when looking at Saturday, what appeared to some as audacity didn't come from nowhere. Behind those few seconds over DHL Stadium sits generations of accumulated knowledge, training and technical competence. What we witnessed was simply the interest on a very old bank of skill.

And that's probably true of far more of South Africa than our national conversation allows.

There is an enormous amount of ordinary excellence here.

Parents make household budgets work that shouldn't.

People send children to university when, on paper, they shouldn't be able to.

Businesses navigate an obstacle course and still open the doors every morning.

Teachers produce extraordinary results without extraordinary resources.

I'm increasingly reluctant to call that resilience. Because sometimes calling everything resilience actually understates what we're looking at.

Sometimes it's ingenuity.

Sometimes it's discipline.

Sometimes it's years of practice.

Sometimes people are simply bloody good at what they do.

On Saturday between 17h00 and 19h00 our excellence was impossible to ignore.

Our scepticism is earned. Keep it. But perhaps we should also interrogate the reflex that makes incompetence immediately believable and excellence somehow harder to accept.

Sometimes the appropriate response isn't suspicion. It's awe.

This is how we #GrowZA