For many South African private pilots, flying is becoming too expensive for fun flying.
The recreational flying industry has been steadily eroded by increases in the cost of living and Rand devaluation. And then there is my old favourite – the ‘buggeration’ factor – which is the difficulty of trying to get things done by obdurate CAA officials.
Flying has a large proportion of dollar-based costs, specifically: fuel, maintenance and aircraft prices. It’s now only the very rich who can afford to burn holes in the sky with 210s or Barons. I cannot believe that I managed to hire and fly a Baron when I was a 30 year old middle manager.
The reduction in private flying would have been catastrophic for the GA industry if it hadn’t been for the massive surge in demand for flying training from Africa and the Middle East. Part of the reason is that instructors and accommodation costs in South Africa have become cheap.
There’s an old adage; ‘If you pay peanuts you get monkeys’. The problem of paying instructors peanuts continues to undermine flight instruction. Where are the professional flight instructors, such as Jim Davis, who made it their life’s mission to train pilots? They have almost all been made redundant by 200-hour comm pilots who are prepared to accept the proverbial peanuts for the sake of hour building.
And so we continue to see fatal accidents by instructors who did not know better. The latest tragedy is that of a C172 reportedly doing stall turns at Joburg’s Baragwanath airfield. It stalled and spun in, killing the Tanzanian instructor and student.
I had almost 1000 hours before I learned the dangers of stall turns. While vertical, the plane can easily flick onto its back into an inverted flat spin. The only way to stop 200 hour instructors doing this, is to have a rigorous system in place that monitors the flight and the instructors’ actions. The gliding community has affordable software that does this.
Another solution is to put the fear of death into instructors and students. The SAAF did this with a particularly gory slideshow that showed the unsanitised remains of pilots who had reduced themselves to bits of raw meat.
Commenting on the Baragwanath accident, Jim Davis asked, “Where did they learn to do that? What sort of example had their instructor set? And how does he sleep at night? And who had to tell their mummies and daddies, who had possibly hocked their life savings, that their pride and joy was now strawberry jam? And will the CAA even invite the CFI in for tea and biscuits?”
If South African flying training is to continue to be world-class, it will have to improve its internal controls.