Transparency failures risk turning aviation transformation into another costly state scandal. It’s almost too easy to imagine the comrades, sitting around, deciding how and what to eat from the apparently limitless well of taxpayer rands. Aviation projects are instead absorbed into aggregated discretionary grant reporting, obscuring how much public funding individual entities received and over what period. Critically, both reports fail to disclose learner-level data, with no confirmation of how many trainees enrolled in aviation programmes, or how many completed the training. The fact that this information is missing makes us wonder whether it does exist at all, or if this is just another eating menu for comrades.