Plane crashes on the decline
There has been a marked decline in the number of private aircraft accidents in the past three years‚ but more still needs to be done‚ director of civil aviation Poppy Khoza said on Monday.
Briefing the media on the work of the South African Civil Aviation Authority (CAA)‚ Khoza said these accidents happened in the general aviation area.
“This has absolutely nothing to do with commercial scheduled operations‚ the normal airlines as we know them.
“Here we still have a problem‚ a problem that seems to be slowly diminishing in that when we compare accidents in the past three years … [there is] a decline‚” Khoza said.
Khoza said there had been a 50% reduction in aircraft accidents when comparing the statistics of four years ago and the statistics of 2016/2017 financial year.
“We saw 144 accidents four years ago. At the end of 2016/2017‚ we had 72 accidents‚ a 50 percent reduction.”
Khoza said the CAA would want to work harder and to see the number improving to a point where there should be no accidents.
“If it is doable in the scheduled commercial operations‚ I would like to believe it can be doable in the private flying operations.”
Khoza said in the 2017/2018 financial year‚ the CAA was concerned that there had been more accidents when compared to the 2016/2017 year.
“In the 2016/17 financial year‚ we had 72 accidents. We are now sitting at 75. This is a cause of concern for us because we were doing well and suddenly there is now a bit of a spike.”
Khoza said the CAA was paying attention to this and what it could do to ensure that that the number of accidents is reduced.
However‚ Khoza said the number of fatal accidents had reduced.
“Fatal accidents have gone down but accidents have gone up.
“With everything that we have put in place as a regulator in terms of a programme on how best to strengthen regulations‚ it seems to be yielding positive results in that fatal accidents are declining year on year. To date‚ we have recorded 14 fatal accidents‚ including in the month of February.”
She said there had been no fatalities in the commercial scheduled operations since 1994. The last commercial incident was the Heldeberg crash‚ when a South African Airways flight from Taiwan to Johannesburg crashed into the Indian Ocean in 1987‚ killing all 159 on board.
Peter Mashaba‚ CAA executive of accident and incident investigations‚ said one trend the organisation had noticed was of accidents where the pilots were airline transport pilots who owned general aviation aircraft or who operated general aircraft over the weekends.
He said that most pilots involved in crashes did have valid licences.
"We ask ourselves a question: this is a highly trained and qualified pilot‚ what could be the reason why‚ when he flies in general aviation. they disregard certain things.”