Plan to fix major flight safety problems in South Africa

The Air Traffic Navigation Services (ATNS) has detailed ongoing interventions to resolve a dire shortage of air traffic controllers in South Africa and failures to adhere to important flight instrument procedure requirements.

In the past few months, media reports and a column in Sunday Times by Plane Talking managing director Linden Birns have highlighted the significant problems.

Birns reiterated his stance on the issues in recent feedback to MyBroadband.

He explained that the global flight industry has been experiencing a shortage of qualified air traffic controllers, radar controllers, and instrument flight procedure designers in the past few years.

Commercial air transport demand has surged at an annual compounded growth rate of 4.5% for the past two decades.

Authorities have been unable to keep up with training staff to coordinate air traffic control, which is essential to flight safety.

In addition, the Covid-19 pandemic and its near total shutdown of commercial flights led to many experienced people being lost to the industry through retrenchments, early retirement, death or other attrition.

South Africa has been particularly hard hit by the shortage as countries like Australia and the United Arab Emirates have lured ATNS personnel with bigger salaries.

In addition, Birns said the South African Air Force had experienced significant budget cuts and was no longer a “nursery or feeder for air traffic controllers.

The shortage of air traffic controllers and instrument procedure designers in South Africa has had several consequences:

• Flow control with greater distances between aircraft departing or landing has been implemented on several occasions due to limited air traffic control staff, resulting in significantly increased flight operating costs for airlines.
• Planes have been unable to land or take off at certain airports due to inclement weather and instrument procedures being withdrawn.
• The Johannesburg Terminal Manoeuvring Area being categorised as Class G for limited periods, during which time there is effectively no air traffic control.
• ATNS being forced to withdraw 300 instrument procedures on 19 July 2024 after failing to file paperwork for mandatory regular review. Caused in part by shortage of instrument design specialists.

As a result of these problems, one airline experienced 3,900 flight delays, numerous diversions, and cancellations in less than three months.

Birns called on the transport minister to engage with technocrats and aviation experts regarding the industry’s reliance on instrument flight procedures.

He also said that the South African Civil Aviation Authority (SACAA) should provide guidance to ATNS on the information and format in which it wants to receive the instrument procedure review applications.

“This would avoid a situation we are currently seeing where ATNS is submitting its applications to the SACAA, but many are being rejected and returned to ATNS for reworking,” said Birns.

Progress in turnaround plan

ATNS head of corporate affairs, Mphilo Dlamini, acknowledged and accepted some of the points highlighted by Birns in a piece published in the Sunday Times.

“ATNS recognises the inconvenience caused and apologises to all those affected; we have redoubled our efforts to resolve all these issues,” he said.

However, Dlamini said ATNS had developed a comprehensive turnaround plan to address the issues. It has presented this plan to transport minister Barbara Creecy and the aviation industry.

Dlamini said that the situation had improved since the ATNS had started holding biweekly meetings with Creecy and key industry stakeholders to track progress on the turnaround plan.

Dlamini said ATNS had hired five external contractors to augment its current two full-time procedure design specialists.

“ATNS is also engaging two more service providers for a planned total of seven contractors,” Dlamini added.

ATNS also had five trainees undergoing on-the-job training who should be ready to join the two full-time specialists by March 2025.

In addition, ATNS was “on track” to submit all urgent instrument procedures in time to coordinate approval by SACAA and for operational use by the end of November 2024.

Dlamini also lamented the significant challenge the ATNS had in retaining experienced air traffic controllers.

To counter the luring of controllers to other markets such as Australia, Europe, and the Middle East, ATNS was continuously developing various retention mechanisms.

“The retention strategy aims to support broader long-term talent management and boost training pipeline capacity,” Dlamini said.

“Prior to the pandemic, we used to train about 40 bursary beneficiaries a year, to feed the attrition rate, but that had to pause for two years during Covid-19, which contributed to the current shortages.”

“We are in the process of closing that gap, with an increased annual intake of about 60 bursars a year over the past two years.”

Dlamini added that ATNS was headhunting former colleagues who left for other countries but were willing to come home.

In addition, ATNS had reached out to global air navigation service providers that poached its talent to enter into cooperation agreements to mitigate talent loss.