Air body should let go of control

Since the Middle Ages, judge, jury and executioner cannot be the same person.

It begs the question, then, how the South African Civil Aviation Authority (Sacaa) can play all three roles, especially when investigating itself.

Air crash investigations are not cosplay, but for six years of Jekyll-and-Hyde role playing, Sacaa believed it could play multiple parts.

Its own calibration aircraft crashed in 2020, killing three people.

The victims’ families sought ministerial intervention for an independent investigation by the Ethiopian Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, after Sacaa initially blamed the pilots.

Sacaa subsequently disputed the Ethiopian findings.

There is a reason the International Civil Aviation Organisation says an accident investigation authority should be independent from the regulator.

In most aviation markets, that separation is absolute.

In SA, Sacaa does everything, despite calls for separation and a ministerial commitment the functions will be split.

Sacaa claims it has an arm’s-length relationship with investigators in SA.

But an arm is still connected to the body, not so?

Last week, former accident investigator-turned-airworthiness-inspector Jeremiah Visser was fired by the regulator after previously being suspended.

He had written a manuscript about the crash and made what he says was a protected disclosure through Sacaa’s internal whistle-blowing mechanism.

Yet, when Visser completed his manuscript, Sacaa said it was “not even focusing” on whether his information was correct, but rather on its assertion that he had no right to use information it considered proprietary.

Would a genuinely independent national aviation administration respond to potential new evidence this way?

Through all of this, the families of the dead remain without closure, while the aviation industry continues waiting for what it has long demanded: a truly independent accident investigation bureau.

Six years later, that should not still be too much to reasonably ask.