ATTITUDE FOR ALTITUDE: GUY LEITCH
ZS-CAR was
inexcusable
Two years to the day after the crash of SACAA’s own calibration aircraft, the CAA issued its final accident report on the fate of its Cessna Citation, ZS-CAR. Perhaps it hoped to get away with an low-key release of the report as it was done on a Sunday afternoon. But in aviation circles the response grew into a tidal wave of anger and opprobrium. IT APPEARS THE CAA was so surprised by the blow-back that it has now announced that it is going to contest the findings of its own report. This despite having sat on the report for two months. And so the ghastly saga of CAA’s fatal ineptitude becomes a protracted farce. How long can the Director, Ms Poppy Khoza, survive this steady stream of disasters? There is much noise about this crash, so I am going to reduce it to just two questions:
1. What caused the crash? It was pilot error. Plain and simple. The commander, Captain TC Tolo, was out of his depth. He was a classic example of the Peter Principle which states that a person who is competent at their job will get promoted until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent. TC Tolo had been promoted to the level that he was no longer competent to handle the demands of calibration flights. They are demanding to fly in good weather – and impossibly dangerous in bad weather, which is why they have to be flown in strict VFR.
the ghastly saga of CA A’ s f a t a l ineptitude
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What caused the crash?
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How did the CAA fail so badly?
There were plenty of red flags about Tolos limitations which the SACAA’s Flight Inspection Unit (FIU) safety management systems (SMS)
16
February 2022
