82 SA Flyer Magazine
Every two years, the 79
Aircraft Owner and Pilot
Associations from around
the world get together
at their World Assembly.
The 79 countries, totalling
over 400,000 individual
members, are afliated
through the International
Council of Aircraft Owner
and Pilot Associations
(IAOPA) which represents
general aviation at ICAO.
T
HIS year’s assembly
was held in picturesque
Queenstown, New Zealand,
and highlighted global
medical reform, new and
emerging technologies,
benets of Performance-Based
Navigation (PBN), and the challenges and
opportunities with unmanned aircraft.
Despite the remote location, the
Queenstown assembly attracted over 100
delegates, including the presidents of some
20 AOPAs internationally, and there were
many illustrious attendees and speakers:
ICAO Secretary General Dr Fang Liu is
now a regular speaker and panellist at our
events; the Director of the New Zealand
Civil Aviation Authority, Graeme Harris;
Director of the Australian CASA, Shane
Carmody; and ICAO Regional Director,
Arun Mishra, made up the group of
regulatory heavyweights. Other speakers
included General Aviation Manufacturers
Association (GAMA) President Pete Bunce,
Air New Zealand Captain Graham Cheal,
and Chief of Operations David Morgan,
Jeppesen’s Cay Roth and EUROCAE’s
Christian Schleifer-Heingartner.
For AOPA South Africa and me, the
event was a great opportunity to reinforce
and maintain the strong relationship we
have with our international counterparts,
and to exchange views and develop
consistent strategies to meet the challenges
that general aviation faces worldwide. This
group has become like family over the
years, old friends whose enthusiasm for
private aviation is unshakeable.
ISSUES
In her keynote address, ICAO’s Dr
Fang Liu set the tone by encouraging
general aviation representatives to be more
proactive in engaging with ICAO. “ICAO
remains fully committed to safeguarding
the fundamental global interoperability of
civil aviation, a key aspect of why aircraft
operations have become such an incredible
force for peace and economic prosperity
in the world,” Dr Liu explained. “However,
when civil aviation authorities fail to take
into account the differences between
commercial air transport and general
aviation, the results can too often be the
over-regulation of the general aviation
sector. This signicantly constrains its
ability to grow, and to thrive. Fortunately,
ICAO and the general aviation sector have
already established a very healthy and
productive level of collaboration to address
these and other issues.”
An issue that received a lot of attention
was aviation medicals for private pilots.
Although South Africans generally seem
reasonably content with their situation,
which has seen considerable reform
over the past few years, there is great
inconsistency regarding the stringency
of private pilot medicals in many other
countries.
A number of discussions and
presentations revolved around the roll-
out of ADS-B. PBN was also a subject
of considerable interest, largely due to
ICAO’s view that these systems will become
increasingly dominant in civil aviation and
that general aviation will need to integrate
with present and future planning for these
IAOPA WORLD ASSEMBLY 2018
AOPA BRIEFING AIRCRAFT OWNERS & PILOTS ASSOCIATION – SOUTH AFRICA
WORDS:
CHRIS MARTINUS
ICAO Secretary General Dr Fang Liu presents her opening
address in which she encouraged AOPA representatives
to be more proactive in engaging with ICAO.
AOPA South Africa President Chris Martinus in an animated
discussion with New Zealand CAA Director Graeme Harris
and Australia CASA Director Shane Carmody.
83 SA Flyer Magazine
systems and technologies. There are hopes that these systems will
provide solutions to the intractable problem of integrating manned,
unmanned and otherwise autonomous aircraft into the world’s
airspaces.
There was considerable emphasis on the fact that there is a
huge decit of trained pilots to ll the needs of the airlines – and that
general aviation is very important as the training ground for future
airline pilots, despite it being largely side-lined by other sectors in
the aviation industry.
DRONES
Unmanned and autonomous aircraft were lightly touched upon
at the assembly in Chicago two years ago. We had raised the point
that the time had already come to nd regulatory solutions to the
incompatibilities between manned and unmanned aircraft sharing
airspace. The century-old tried-and-tested VFR ight which makes
up the majority of private operations is simply not compatible with
aircraft which do not have the capability to “see and avoid” trafc
and maintain their own separation. But, there was nevertheless
comparatively little discussion about what we perceived as a highly
disruptive technology.
That has changed. The assembly in Queenstown was
dominated by considerations of how the aviation world would
change in the next few years. A sobering view was that since
unmanned drones now vastly outnumber manned aircraft, general
aviation as we know it would have to give way to the majority
interests of drone operators.
We asked ICAO if VFR ight can now be considered dead.
The answer was no, but that there would be a lot of changes in the
future, particularly for operations at the lower altitudes populated by
most GA aircraft.
Jeppesen’s Cay Roth gave a very interesting talk which was
illustrative of where things are going: Jeppesen (already a Boeing
company) and recently purchased Aurora Flight Sciences (the
developer of the Centaur ‘optionally piloted’ aircraft) are being tightly
integrated into Boeing and its projects. Already a fully autonomous
Boeing 737 MAX is being own. From pushback, the aircraft starts
itself, taxis out, takes off, negotiates airspaces, lands and parks
itself without human intervention. The crew on board are only there
to monitor the newly-developed systems and to maintain legality in
this testing phase.
Amusingly, Roth related that Jepp has greater difculties
operating the drones that carry small items between their two ofce
buildings in Germany that are 800 m apart. The difculties do not
relate to functionality of the drones themselves, but to the concerns
of the supermarket that lies between the buildings, and city ofcials
who are concerned that the drones may fall on the people below.
The reality is that the difference between toy drones and the
next generation of airliners is shrinking quickly. They are all simply
unmanned aircraft and their integration with manned aircraft in the
same skies is now an enormous challenge for which solutions need
to be found with great urgency.
During discussions about how GA carries the responsibility for
training up future airline pilots and so must attract young people,
AOPA UK President Martin Robinson asked, “How can we, with a
clear conscience, encourage youngsters to make great sacrices for
a job which will simply not exist in 10 years’ time?”
And where will we t in, ying our conventional light aircraft,
when drone operators already believe that the sky below 500 feet is
theirs?
Notable too was a talk by Pete Bunce, President of GAMA, who
represents aircraft manufacturers such as Cessna, Piper, Cirrus,
Mooney and so on. Most of his presentation revolved around the
burgeoning numbers of ‘passenger drones’, largely autonomous,
one and two-seat aircraft that are being developed and tested as
short-haul aerial passenger vehicles – which also require no pilot at
all.
CONCLUSION
The 2018 World Assembly in many respects asked more
questions than it found solutions. There is much hard work to be
done to preserve and protect our private use of aircraft in a world of
increasingly accelerating technologies.
AOPA BRIEFING AIRCRAFT OWNERS & PILOTS ASSOCIATION – SOUTH AFRICA COLUMNS
j
Pete Bunce, President of the General Aviation Manufacturers
Association, talked about the changing face of GA in relation
to passenger drones.
Medical panellists. There was an interesting discussion
around the changing medical regulations for private pilots.
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