Childhood dream to fly comes true
Sokweba now flies jets over his Tembisa home
Planes fly lower over Tembisa township all the time, as they prepare for the landing strips a few minutes to the south at OR Tambo International Airport. Nkululeko Sokweba grew up seeing and being fascinated by these metal birds when still growing up in the Madelakufa informal settlement.
Even more, the destination of these planes at the airport was where Sokweba’s father worked as a cleaner. Today, at the age of 25, he is a qualified commercial pilot and works as a flight instructor at Thompson’s Aviation at Wonderboom Airport in Pretoria. Sokweba explains that his passion for planes heightened from when he was four, when his father would often take him and his two sisters to his work place. “In 1997, the South African Olympic team plane would fly over our house. It was a Boeing 747-300, the queen of the skies, and especially designed for the team. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen,” he recalled.
In 2011, he completed matric as one of the top three students in his and received a bursary from the Gauteng City Region Academy. He enrolled to study education at Wits University while continuing to look for funding for aviation studies. In 2014, he succeeded as was chosen for the South African Airways (SAA) Cadet Pilot Programme. After many weeks of tough theoretical training, he took his first flying lesson on March 15 2015. Aspiring pilots must fly a minimum of 35 hours to receive a student’s pilot licence while a minimum of 200 hours is needed to receive a commercial pilot’s licence. Sokweba’s favourite aircraft is the Airbus A340-600, which he had the chance to fly from Cape Town to Johannesburg earlier this year.
“I was assigned to fly the plane one night, and I had to fly over our house in Tembisa. It was such a great feeling,” he said.
This article first appeared in GCIS -Vukuzenzele