Why is the South African Civil Aviation Authority grounding planes?

Every couple of years the South African Civil Aviation Authority (SACAA) launches an ill-advised campaign that will decimate a large part of the industry it is supposed to develop.  

Past examples of these capricious campaigns included the attempt to destroy CemAir, the grounding of Comair/kulula and an attempt to regulate private airfields all but out of existence.  

Once again the huge general aviation industry finds itself embroiled in the middle of one of those campaigns; for many aircraft owners and operators, this is a life-or-death struggle.  

The Commercial Aviation Association of South Africa reckons that 300,000 lives are affected, thousands of jobs are in the process of being lost, and hundreds of millions wiped off aircraft values – many of which will just be scrapped, never to be replaced.  

Aircraft financiers are finding that their book values have been so badly eroded that they are underwater with negative equity. Aircraft insurers have seen their premium income dry up as owners cannot fly. And those owners who have given up and want to export their aircraft for sale cannot do so because the SACAA will not issue air-worthiness certificates. By the SACAA’s own estimates, 3,874 aircraft are rotting on the ground. Cynics say it’s one way for the SACAA to reduce the number of accidents. 

The SACAA is grounding thousands of aircraft because it claims the engines are old, yet it has no evidence to support its claims. In fact, quite the opposite is demonstrably true – older engines are safer than recently overhauled engines. 

General aviation may be perceived by some as a rich “weekend warrior”  hobby – but the industry is far bigger than that. It trains airline pilots, its enables food security by crop spraying, it fights forest fires, it provides life-or-death helicopter rescue – the list is endless.   

An illustrative example of the damage wreaked by the SACAA’s grounding of a large part of the fleet is an ophthalmologist who owns a twin-engine Cessna 402. He has never stinted on maintenance, as he uses the Cessna to fly doctors and nurses across Southern African Development Community countries to perform cataract eye surgery – for free. He has restored the sight of hundreds of people who would otherwise be blind, but now that the SACAA has grounded his perfectly sound aircraft, he has had to stop his sight-restoration surgeries.  

Recommendation vs requirement

The origin of the issue is simple: in the notoriously litigious US environment, the engine manufacturers are wary of product liability, so they recommend that their engines be overhauled every 12 years or, in operational time, after they have done about 2,000 hours. Typically, many general aviation engines do about 60 hours per year and so they still have two-thirds of their life expectancy remaining after 12 years. Yet the SACAA insists they be stripped down and completely overhauled.  

Aircraft owners and operators argue that the SACAA is disingenuously misinterpreting the engine manufacturers’ recommendations by making them requirements. The industry has three key problems with this: 

First, cost. It will cost the ophthalmologist about R4m to overhaul the two engines on his Cessna. Many owners or operators do not have the capital for this and will scrap their aircraft for spare parts.   

Second, safety. Counterintuitively, a regularly inspected aircraft engine that has accumulated perhaps 1,000 hours is less likely to fail than one which has been freshly overhauled.  

Third, time. Parts are in short supply worldwide and it is expected to take at least a year or two of downtime to get engines overhauled. Plus, there will be a huge backlog of engines to be overhauled by the few facilities in South Africa. 

The SACAA justifies grounding these aircraft by absurdly claiming “regulatory misalignment”: it claims that it has to ground the planes because its own rules have become obsolete in that they “point to rules that no longer exist”. Further, it insists that the wrong type of document has been used to allow a waiver of these rules for the past 20 years.

This, of course, raises the question: why not just update the rules instead of grounding 3,000 aircraft? 

Managing risk

The regulator’s trump card is always the two-edged sword of safety and liability: the SACAA argues that if an accident were traced to an “old” engine, it could make the regulator liable for the accident.  

The SACAA claims it is aligning with global best practices (and to its credit it has a world-class International Civil Aviation Organisation compliance score). So the SACAA claims that if it did not enforce “fundamental safety standards” it could lead to a downgrading of South Africa’s aviation safety rating. Yet the 12-year overhaul recommendation is not “an international safety standard” and South Africa is unique in wanting to mandate this recommendation. 

The SACAA insists that its stance is “safety-first”, regardless of cost. The regulator’s director, Poppy Khoza, says: “Decisions taken for safety can override commercial interests, and finding a balance isn’t always possible when lives are at stake.”  

The problem is – she’s wrong. It’s a fallacy to say that safety is non-negotiable. If that was true, no aircraft would ever leave the ground. Risk must be managed – not avoided. For the SACAA, safety may well be the highest priority, but it cannot be regulated without concern for costs – either direct, or in long-term damage to the industry.  

This is not the industry’s first rodeo with this issue and the regulator. Solid arguments were advanced 20 years ago against this very damaging rule. The arguments are even stronger now, with a weaker rand and the lack of investment and growth in the aviation industry.  

There have been crisis meetings with transport minister Barbara Creecy. But the SACAA remains obdurate, and the matter looks set to drag through the courts. 

Meanwhile the South Africanisation of the world-class general aviation industry continues. Tourists will struggle to get to game lodges, investors will not get to check out opportunities. Crops may not be sprayed, forest fires not fought, accident victims may die on the side of the road – and our flying doctor will not be able to restore sight to his blind patients. 

Dr Guy Leitch is an aviation analyst and the editor of SA Flyer magazine.

_{Top image: Rawpixel / Currency collage.}