PHOTO: SA CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY
Air safety was in the spotlight on Wednesday when the SA Civil Aviation Authority hosted its second general aviation accident reduction seminar in Gqeberha.
It was part of the SACAA’s ongoing and coordinated efforts to promote an all-round better safety culture among pilots, aviation professionals and creating awareness amongst the general public.
Neil de Lange, senior manager for general aviation, said there are many causal factors related to air-craft accidents.
In 2010, the SACAA introduced a Centralised Safety Reporting System that was aimed at improving aviation safety by reducing aircraft accidents.
According to Defenceweb, the authority said in a statement that the new system provides a platform for the public and those that are involved in aviation operations such as pilots, air traffic controllers, flight attendants, engineers, airport and ground personnel, to report unsafe activities, omissions and situations that could lead to an aircraft accident.
The new system, however, did not replace the reporting of an accident or serious incident which should still be reported to the Accident and Incident Investigation Division of the SACAA.
De Lange elaborated on this year’s seminar in Gqeberha.
'LIGHT AIRCRAFT ACCIDENTS'
“It pivots on a couple of things,” he said.
“For instance, educational guidance to instructors on how to impart the softer skills of flying – not the harder skills like actually flying the airplane – but how to read these things that work on the cockpit environment and that causes accidents.
“So it’s really a seminar that is based on equipping the instructors to teach the students to be more mindful on all these things that can work on the environment that they’re functioning.”
De Lange said the environment is very diverse.
“We’re talking about aerial photography, crop spraying, even border surveillance… there’s so many, many areas [and] there’s professional aerobatic flights and so forth.
“So all of these obviously lend itself to a very wide environment for operations in which there’s all sorts of things that can occur.
“And I think the reason why you hear more about light aircraft accidents more than you’d hear about commercial accidents is the environment they’re functioning in.”
At the beginning of 2014, the SACAA said it was concerned about the spate of aircraft accidents which claimed the lives of 11 people in less than two months.
All these accidents, reported between January 1 and February 18, occurred in the general aviation and not the scheduled commercial airlines sector. The general aviation sector consists mainly of privately-owned small aircraft as well as recreational aircraft.
