Yes, Bryan races a plane, but…

BA are flying their new Airbus A380 aircraft on their Joburg route (but not Cape Town because the runway is too short) from February 2014 and they recruited local rugby hero Bryan Habana to let us know about that by racing the plane along the tarmac.
England Rugby captain Chris Robshaw came to watch, presumably to provide the Heathrow side of things, and Bryan also brought South Africa Rugby captain Jean de Villiers along with him.

Bryan takes Jean everywhere he goes. Except Toulon.

Here’s the video:

Wow! What a finish!!

But it’s actually not the finish that bothered me so much. It was the start.
Who was that waving the flag to get them going? Why, it was model Georgia May Jagger.
But again, it wasn’t so much the model that bothered me. It was the flag.

ba flag

It’s upside down.

We’ve been here before. And this isn’t great for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, it’s just plain (no pun intended) bad form. Damn rude.

And, in addition, were BA’s creatives not aware of the specific instructions with regard to the use of the National Flag, as found in the Government Gazette 22356, Notice 510 of 8 June 2001? Obviously not, because otherwise the flag would not just have been the right way up, it wouldn’t have been there at all – check out section 15(d):resflag

Oops.

Fortunately, no-one in South Africa is very good at remembering which way up the National Flag should be flown anyway. And they were far too bothered with Bryan Habana racing a big plane to notice that the flag was being used inappropriately and waved incorrectly.

Still, once this post is published and the South African public is awakened to this heinous act of disrespect, I expect outrage, several open letters, possibly an online petition and (almost certainly) a boycott. Oh, and accusations of some sort of -ism.

And in other news, I’ve just heard that Airbus have demanded a rematch. At 35,000 feet.