By Gavin McAllister
Two of South Africa’s Airlink regional jets performed a flyover lower than 50 feet above Cape Town’s DHL stadium on August 29. 56,000 people witnessed the controversial pass in-person, while potentially millions more on the internet continue to form their own opinions.
Even though the South African Civil Aviation Authority maintains a Category 1 safety rating like the FAA does, it doesn’t give a good enough idea of how strict the organization is in order to tell why the flyover was approved.
To those who think of the Federal Aviation Administration as the only official aviation organization, the FAA has nothing to do with the flyover at the DHL stadium. Instead, the South African Civil Aviation Authority was the one to organize the flyover that sparked intense debates. The flyover made it look obvious to everyone that the SACAA is much less strict than the FAA, but that case is actually the opposite from the truth.
According to Coliseum Online, the flyover is being reviewed by the SACAA, “after, it drew safety concerns,” as mentioned by officials on September 2nd. The SACAA also said that it obtained flight recordings and other information from Airlink for review as part of its assessment of safety. In their words, “It is, therefore, critical that we interrogate this past weekend’s events… to determine if there were any safety concerns which warrant a review.” Coliseum Online said that, “a full report with recommendations will be issued once the review is complete.”
ABC News stated that Airlink has canceled plans of a repeat of the flyover because of its “unusually low” and “dramatic” drawing of international attention. The SACAA said that South Africa “is ranked seventh globally and first in Africa for our aviation safety standards by the International Civil Aviation Organization.”
