98 SA Flyer Magazine
98
SA Flyer
A
ll pilots have heard the
aphorisms about starting
ying with a bucket full of
luck and an empty bucket
of experience, and that you
cannot gain experience without making
mistakes, and so on.
Newcomers to aviation tend to
understand that the challenge is to learn as
much as possible by taking some risks, but
being able to discern that ne line between
acceptable risk and probable death is the
trick.
Once we have achieved prociency,
these considerations tend to occupy
our minds less and less, except when
unexpected circumstances arise. Only
the wise have already considered the
unexpected and planned for these
contingencies, while others merely hope
that bad things will never happen to them.
FOCUS ON THE FUTURE
Since there is currently a brief lull in
issues related to general aviation, it is a
good time to step back from the chaos
and confusion of contemporary politics,
economics and bureaucratic frustrations
and consider the bigger picture in order to
navigate our way forward.
Oscar Wilde’s statement, “Experience
is simply the name we give our mistakes,”
is similar to Nietzsche’s quote, but is widely
misunderstood to be passive and fatalistic.
Not so. Wilde, and probably Nietzsche,
had something much more inspirational in
mind: “A dreamer is one who can only nd
his way by moonlight, and his punishment
is that he sees the dawn before the rest of
the world.” Meaning those who make the
effort to try to look a little into the future are
often punished for their vision. But pilots are
different: they are taught to be ahead of the
aircraft – and this often comes from making
and learning from mistakes – having
experience.
Likewise, being ahead and informed of
possible new regulations and practices will
help SA’s aviation industry survive in the
future.
THE PRESENT
Our Civil Aviation Authority is very
preoccupied with the ICAO audit which
will be commencing as you read this.
The audit is to establish South Africa’s
levels of compliance with the Standards
and Recommended Practices (SARPs)
which bind states who contracted into the
Chicago Convention, which has since 1944
standardised international civil aviation.
The ICAO audit is a serious matter,
since audits are only performed when
there have been previous ndings by ICAO
which have not been remedied or when
other contracting states are concerned
about non-compliance. Adverse ndings
can result in blacklisting by major states’
authorities, most notably the USA’s FAA,
Europe’s EASA, China and other states
with signicant international air trafc to
South Africa.
Being the regulator, CAA has
responded by making more regulations.
Rafts of regulations have been pushed
into the consultation process over the
past several months. Most of them are
designed to pay lip service to the SARPs,
AOPA BRIEFING
Chris Martinus ‒ Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association – South Africa
That which does not KILL
us makes us STRONGER
This piece of wisdom
from philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche in
1888 is widely applicable
in aviation.