What Are A Dozen SAAF Gripens Doing In Long-Term Storage?

We spotted on interesting article on the storage of fighter jets in South Africa. Many will be interested because of the Gripen fighter jets, whereas our attention was drawn by the word "storage!" Self storage is cool, it makes us tick, it's what we do. Storing twelve fighter jets just shows the diversity of what can be stored and all the interesting things that can be found in storage. The South African Air Force (SAAF) seem to be well aware of this and are now storing their jets, though sadly not with us. They clearly have not heard about our month to month contracts, easy term move-ins, free use of our trolleys, a full retail packaging store, security and access control. 


The unfortunate scenario is that the running costs of the jets are just too high. The article in on defenceWeb, A dozen SAAF Gripens in long-term storage, tells the story of how South Africa now needs to store 12 of the 26 Gripens that were purchased. To further exacerbate the situation we do not have the funds to provide our pilots with adequate training hours and we only have six pilots who are qualified! Sadly this means that these magnificent machines will be spending a bit of time in storage rather than in the air.

As with many of our customers there comes a time when the need for self storage is over. When you have finished moving home, the house renovation is done or the business stock is sold. Almost all of our customers return and we recently received a 98% positive response to our anonymous customer satisfaction surveys. We do hope this trend continues and the Gripen fighters are out in their natural habitat sooner rather than later.


You may not have a Gripen fighter jet to store but if you do need some storage, please check out our handy self storage space estimator.