By Garth Calitz South Africa has officially entered a new era of aviation accident investigation. The Civil Aviation Amendment Act 22 of 2021 is now in force, the Aviation Safety Investigation Board (ASIB) has been established in law, and the South African Civil Aviation Authority (SACAA) has helpfully clarified that aircraft accident investigations are no longer its problem to explain. There is just one small detail. Who, precisely, is investigating aviation accidents in Sou

By Garth Calitz The SACAA completed its review of Airlink’s controversial stadium flypast, handed its report to the airline and set a deadline for a response. That deadline has passed. So, has anything happened, or has the matter entered South Africa’s increasingly familiar administrative holding pattern? South Africa’s aviation industry has a reasonably straightforward expectation of its regulators' enforcement department: establish the facts, apply the regulations and commu

By Garth Calitz Mineral, semi-synthetic, fully synthetic, or the oil your AMO swears by? Few things can turn a perfectly civil gathering of pilots into an engineering dispute quite like asking what goes into the sump. There are few subjects in general aviation guaranteed to generate as much passionate discussion, unsolicited technical advice and outright certainty as engine oil. Mention the subject at a South African flying club and, within minutes, you will have one pilot ex

By Garth Calitz An aviation safety investigation, a pilot’s career on the line, and an uncomfortable question: how do you challenge a finding when the evidence you want to examine is no longer available? South African aviation has no shortage of regulations, procedures, committees and people whose job descriptions suggest that every conceivable eventuality has already been anticipated. Yet when something goes wrong, the system occasionally produces a result that leaves everyo

By Garth Calitz Cybersecurity concerns, unexplained financial record deletions and an uncomfortable audit outcome have put South Africa’s air navigation service provider under scrutiny. For an organisation responsible for keeping the country’s skies orderly, the questions are piling up faster than the answers. Few organisations in South African aviation can afford to have a bad day quite like Air Traffic and Navigation Services (ATNS). When the systems responsible for managin

By Rob Russell Who remembers the good old days of travelling? No visa, and if you needed one, you ambled down to the local embassy of the country you wanted to visit; they asked when you were leaving, checked your passport, stamped it, and off you go. No hassle at the airport, checking in, ambling through security and duty-free and then a peaceful and relaxing flight to your destination of choice. That was until one fateful day in September 2001. The world woke up to terroris

By Garth Calitz FlySafair takes SAA Technical to court after an Airbus A320 broke loose during a tow and collided with a parked Boeing 737 at OR Tambo There are few things more reassuring at an international airport than watching an aircraft being towed. The engines are shut down, the passengers are safely nowhere near it, the aircraft isn't flying anywhere under its own power and a tug is doing the hard work. It should, in theory, be one of the least dramatic activities taki

By Garth Calitz EASA suspends all Elixir operations following fatal Rochefort crash as investigators search for answers Elixir Aircraft, one of Europe's newer general aviation manufacturers, has been dealt a devastating blow following the death of two of its production test pilots in a crash in France on 1 October. The accident, involving an Elixir aircraft during a test flight near Rochefort-Saint-Agnant Airport in western France, has prompted an immediate grounding of the e

By Garth Calitz The ZS-CAR story has taken another significant turn, with Transport Minister Barbara Creecy asking Justice Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi to initiate a judicial inquest into the January 2020 crash of South African Civil Aviation Authority (SACAA) Cessna Citation S550 ZS-CAR near George. The move comes after more than six years of controversy surrounding the accident, during which the crash has been investigated, re-investigated, disputed and subjected to increasing

An aircraft flew without relying on GPS navigation signals, instead using quantum sensing technology to measure its movement and maintain an estimate of its position. It may sound like something from a particularly ambitious science-fiction script, but this was very much a real flight test conducted by the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and Honeywell Aerospace. Perhaps the most interesting part of the story is what wasn't happening during those four hours. There was