12 SA Flyer Magazine
F
OLLOWING on from
June’s CAA Dossier
where I outlined some of
the destructive battles
between the CAA and
its Designated Flight
Examiners (DFEs), the
CAA has once again been on the receiving
end of a ‘snot-klap’ from the Civil Aviation
Appeals Committee (CAAC), a surprisingly
effective
committee
put in
place to
control the
misguided
‘frolics’
(their
word)
of the
CAA.
An SAA Senior Captain and DFE, who
was one of the cases reviewed in the June
article, appealed to the CAAC against the
Director of the CAA refusing to renew his
DFE status. Accusations ew thick and
fast: that the DFE had forged VOR let
down plates for Pietermaritzburg and that
the Testing Standards Ofcer – a CAA
employee – had a conict of interest in that
his CPL renewal had been done while he
was testing the DFE. The CAA employed
an expensive advocate to ght its case,
while the DFE represented himself.
In June, after that WUCAA article had
gone to print, the DFE was vindicated
when the CAAC issued a comprehensively
argued judgement against the CAA.
The
reassuring
thing for us as CAA clients is that the CAAC
took the matter seriously, and it produced
a well-argued judgement, replete with
appropriate case law.
This is the second time the CAA has
lost this year to this specic DFE – the
previous time they folded on the steps of
the court and had to pay R94,000 worth of
legal fees.
At the same time the saga of the
E-bury Airport has given the CAA yet
another embarrassing bloody nose. E-
bury Airport was started by a pilot who
decided to develop a residential airport in
the VFR corridor north east of Lanseria.
Although E-bury is beyond Lanseria’s CTR,
Lanseria Airport nonetheless opposed the
development as they argued that it would
adversely impact their future airspace
requirements. It is perhaps interesting to
note that Lanseria argued that they needed
more airspace as they were going to create
GNSS-AR approaches to their new Runway
25. At the time, their airspace specialist told
me he was particularly concerned about
the amount of space required by an airliner
taking off from Lanseria’s Runway 07,
should it have an engine failure and need to
return to land. However, at the time of the
E-bury application, Lanseria Airport was not
able to get Air Trafc Navigation Services
(ATNS) to support their demand for more
airspace.
The CAA insisted that E-bury aireld
not only be ‘registered’ but also licensed,
arguing that it would be for public use in
our most densely populated province. The
developers did not argue this point and their
detailed proposal was thoroughly debated
at the National Airspace Committee
THE CAA DOSSIER GUY LEITCH
PROJECT WUCAA -
WAKE UP CAA!
The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has shown
itself to be an aggressive litigant – yet too
often loses court battles – at great cost to
itself and thus to us, its clients, who must pay
fees.
THE CAA’S
LEGAL FROLICS
The high Court handed down its
judgement in early July – and the
CAA lost yet again.