By the time they’re 30, they can command a salary of R750 000 a year.They’re paid for their nerves of titanium, their unflappability in the tensest of situations. They work six hours a day with a one hour compulsory break and get eight days off a month.
They dress in sweatshirts and jeans. They never take work home. They are air traffic controllers and their job is to help planes either land or take off safely – in total about 1700 times per day nationwide.
Their boss is Wrenelle Stander, 41, a woman so cool and collected she didn’t blink an eyelash at the idea of an Elle photo shoot on a windy runway in a strapless dress on a freezing Johannesburg evening. Lesser pilots would have crashed.
Stander is the CEO of the Air Transport and Navigation Services Company Limited (ATNS), the sole trainer and employer of air traffic controllers in South Africa, and a jumbo-jet-sized player in this space in Africa. The company also manages all air search and rescue missions in South Africa, and often further a field. Stander is one of only three senior aviation experts in the world who are women. South African airspace goes all the way to the South Pole. This makes her in control of more than 10% of the entire world’s airspace.
So starts a profile in the October 2007 edition of Elle South Africa on Wrenelle Stander, written by Flow’s Tara Turkington.