From cream media in Johannesburg, this is the real economy report. On August 13, South Africa's latest aircraft design, the advanced high-performance reconnaissance light aircraft made its first public flights. Keith Campbell was there. The aircraft, known as the Aalak for short, made its maiden flight before the media at Wunderbumerport, North Pretoria. The aircraft is a project of local private sector defense group Paramount with local aerospace company Aerosuit as the prime contractor. The managing director of Aerosuit and of Aalak holdings, Dr Paul Parchita, gives us his thoughts about the project. I think two main elements. The first is that we could capitalize on many years of experience coming through the Ruefalk, the Mirage program, the A400 program. So that on the one hand, the older folk, with the experience being able to guide and to mentor the young guys. But with the young guys really taking the lead. In other words, a young team of young engineers and technicians who have been given the opportunity to turn this thing into reality, to give flight to the innovative traits. That was really the idea, you know, with that combination of experience and young innovativeness. It's probably, as I've said in the press release around 300,000 hours of work done. So it's a huge amount of work. But at the same time, we do believe that we've done it far more cost-effectively than could be the case in larger companies because it's really a skunk work team, a very compact team. And they've done an incredibly good job in getting it into a nice chum and slim chum. The departure point was that we have to be competing into a contested marketplace against the aircraft that already established in the marketplace. That meant that we had decided from the outset to apply the very, very latest technology that we could lay our hands on, get a market edge on the other guys, but to really give us some edge factor. And most important of that was to use electronic digital design. And things like paperless offload onto the factory floor, the prototype, the prototype floor, and things like jiggleous manufacture, which is really the dream, has been the dream of the aviation world for the last 50, 60 years to be able to manufacture that accurately that they can go together like McArdo. And that we certainly have achieved. We cut down the manufacturing times on that prototype. And I believe we have a very, very pure mature product already at this early phase of the program. Erosid is the Erosid Innovation and Training Centre is the prime contractor for the development of the program and that will continue into the future. And as we said a few minutes ago, there's a long road ahead of us in terms of testing and evaluation. So yes, Erosid will certainly remain involved from a manufacturing perspective. It is certainly possible that the established skills within Erosid will be contributing to the manufacture of the aircraft. But I also think that we will have to be gearing up to new technologies and new methodologies, which we've already proven unused during the prototyping phase. Like things like lights out five XSC and C facilities. The sort of thing is very, very much in the offing or for us to be efficient in terms of manufacture to cut down cost and to be more competitive. Other news making headlines this week, rooftop gardens are set to enhance food security. Social housing provided the Johannesburg Housing Company launched another sustainability garden, the Lake Success Food Garden in Hillbrow in June. We are working with a number of property owners to try and get them involved. Just imagine if we have every building in Hillbroke having a food garden on top of the roof. I think that would look nice. And I think if we have scale, the different rooftop gardens can then work together to try and generate income. That's Creamy Media's Real Economy Report. Join us again next week for more news and insight into South Africa's Real Economy.