I WAS ASKED THE OTHER DAY by a senior SACAA official why I call it the ‘Commission Against Aviation’.
I tried to explain the joke; that one of the roles of the SACAA was to develop aviation. Yet the problem is that the excessive regulation and arbitrary enforcement, coupled with ad-hoc ‘tea time’ rule making, has caused many aviation business owners to just give up on the industry and leave.
I call this the ‘buggeration’ factor. It is measurable by how many business owners simply take their hats and coats and ‘bugger off’ out of the industry.
One of the better examples of this was Steve Anderson, who exported his entire medical rescue operation to Malta when faced with the continual difficulties of dealing with an obdurate CAA in getting the appropriate permissions and authorities for his literally life-saving business.
I also tried to make light of the inherent criticism in the Commission Against Aviation jibe by pointing out that it was a natural conflict between the rule-makers and the uses, like that between traffic cops and drivers. But he just didn’t get it. No matter how hard I tried to explain, the official just didn’t seem to understand how of why endless red tape and bureaucracy and officialdom could stifle a business.
In the end we had to agree to disagree.
‘he just didn’t get it’
This understanding gap goes to the very heart of the aviation industry’s inherent conflicts with the regulators. As I write this, ICAO is doing one of its occasional audits of the SACAA.
I have noted before that the SACAA is so focussed on getting a clean ICAO audit that it will readily sacrifice the industry that it is supposed be developing to achieve a good ICAO rating.
The latest example of this arises from the fact that the ILS approaches for all ACSA airports in South Africa have been suspended. This is reportedly due to a blanket approval being no longer valid and so every airport has to be individually approved.
Rather than have this blanket approval as an adverse finding by ICAO, the SACAA has simply shut all ILS approaches. When the weather turns bad, this will have an enormous impact on airline connectivity and the economic growth in South Africa.
A reliable aviation analyst tells me that this practice of sacrificing the aviation industry on the altar of a good ICAO rating is an Africa-wide problem. When the Ugandan Civil Aviation Authority was facing an ICAO audit about its administration of Aircraft Operating Certificates (AOCs), it simply cancelled every AOC over the period of the ICAO inspection.
This meant that the ICAO auditors could not make a finding against cancelled AOCs. Thus, we see an entire industry effectively closed down for the sake of an ICAO box-ticking exercise.
This industry needs grown-ups to run it.
