Aviation expert Guy Leitch says SA's aviation industry is facing a skills crisis that could have a serious impact on air safety if not vigorously addressed.
But a brewing skills shortage in international aviation, along with domestic issues, is making it increasingly difficult to retain key expertise.
“Aviation skills are fantastically portable because the lingua franca of aviation is English. So when there's a skills crisis people find themselves being lured by fat salaries that make up for loss of lifestyle and moving the children from their schools and so on that goes with moving to China and places in the Middle East, like Dubai,” Leitch says.
“We're suffering from a brain drain in SA, particularly in aviation skills, and it's a huge problem.”
Aviation internationally doesn't attract the number of people it once did.
“We've seen a move away from the air forces of the world to train up pilots and associated avionics technicians and engineers et cetera, which reduced the supply of skills into the industry.”
But the big factor has been Covid, which caused a massive shrinkage in airline activity, which is still only about 56% of prepandemic levels.
“As a result, a lot of pilots and technicians took early retirement, and the industry hasn't had the throughput to replace them.”
There's a pilot shortage of 30% in the US — “the most senior, most skilled and experienced pilots. Ditto engineers and technicians.”
In SA, the situation has been “enormously worsened” by the collapse of the state-owned airlines, particularly SAA and SAA Technical, “which is now no longer even doing apprentice training”.
“The issue of maintenance is increasingly critical, as seen by the problems FlySafair and Comair/Kulula have been having.”
To a limited extent, private companies are stepping into the gap and beginning to train engineers and other technicians, but it is not happening fast enough, he says.
We're suffering from a brain drain in SA, particularly in aviation skills
As a result of international pilot shortages and local factors, including transformation, “it's safe to say we've lost an enormous amount of the skills base in terms of experienced, senior pilots who have retired, left SA or been moved on to enable younger pilots to move up the ranks”.
This has obvious safety implications, he says.
Last year's “alpha floor event” involving an SAA Airbus happened because the weight of the plane was incorrectly entered into the flight planning computer by the pilots.
“It was sheer slackness, there was no excuse for that,” says Leitch.
For many years after 1994 SAA managed to hang on to its most skilled and experienced pilots by agreeing to peg their salaries to those of international pilots. “But now plenty have gone, along with air traffic controllers, aircraft maintenance engineers, avionics technicians, load masters and flight dispatchers.”
If the local aviation industry were not still so depressed because of Covid “we'd be in serious trouble”, Leitch says.
Even at its present level it is facing a growing shortage of the key skills essential to maintaining the required safety standards.
“We're short of air traffic controllers. We're seeing air traffic control centres combining their zones under one air traffic controller, which obviously increases the load for the air traffic controller who is now handling more than one area.
“Normally you'd have three or four area controllers operating to control an air traffic area. Then you've got the approach controllers and ground controllers.”
They're also in short supply. They're being poached, lured by better pay and conditions elsewhere, or they're taking early retirement. But the push factor is often low morale.
“Air traffic management has collapsed and there is a lot of unhappiness among air traffic controllers in Air Traffic Navigation Services. We've lost other key staffers, including a woman who resigned recently in absolute disgust with management and bad decisions.”
She is a world class search and rescue expert widely known as “the angel” because she was always on hand for emergencies across vast swathes of ocean from halfway to South America to halfway to Australia and all the way to Antarctica.
“Those skills are also extremely hard to replace.”
Leitch says the woman's reasons for going “are also the reasons why many other highly skilled people have left and are leaving”.
He says a “war” between designated flight examiners (DFEs) and the South African Civil Aviation Authority has caused an exodus of these highly skilled “instructors of the instructors” who ensure that the highest training standards are adhered to by pilots.
“They seem to be regulating the DFEs out of existence.” This has obvious safety implications, he says.
“The DFEs … . are generally the uber-instructors, the best of the best. The key custodians of safety standards for the aviation industry.”
Leitch, who has a master's degree in development finance and a doctorate in African airline connectivity, says that when aviation returns to a semblance of normality the South African aviation industry, which according to 2017 data was contributing R140bn to GDP, is going to be in big trouble.
“We're not training people remotely fast enough to meet the requirements of the industry when it returns to normal. The industry will have to employ people from elsewhere in the world at much higher salaries, including pilots, no doubt.”
One of the single biggest magnets for South African pilots over the last five or 10 years has been China, he says. They get paid three times as much as in SA, and it's tax free.
But South African pilots find it an alien environment and would take a drop in pay if they were better treated in SA.
To retain and get back senior South African pilots from China and the Middle Eastern countries the local industry will have to be more competitive internationally in terms of conditions and working environment, Leitch says.
But he expects there will be “enormous pushback from the unions if we started employing what we call direct entry captains from elsewhere, which would slow down the progression of younger entrants into the industry.
“This could be a serious problem for an aviation industry trying to win back skills it has lost,” he says.
