Authored by Paul Cartwrigh, Jakop Mphofu and Dezhané Diamond.
The Civil Aviation Appeal Committee (CAAC) has set aside an enforcement decision against an obstacle assessment company because the regulator could not clearly explain what rule the company had broken. The appeal succeeded, the matter was remitted for a fresh determination, and the organisation was entitled to a refund of its appeal fees.
In South Africa, anyone who wants to assess whether a building, tower or other structure poses a risk to aircraft must hold a Part 178 approval from the South African Civil Aviation Authority (SACAA). A separate Part 173 approval is needed to design or change the flight paths that aircraft follow. These are different functions, but they overlap in practice because obstacle assessors must consider existing flight paths when deciding whether a structure is safe.
SACAA alleged that the company had strayed into Part 173 territory by conducting work that amounted to flight procedure design. A penalty of R48 000 was imposed. On internal appeal, the Director of Civil Aviation removed the fine but upheld the finding that the company had acted outside its Part 178 approval.
The company appealed to the CAAC. It argued that it had never designed flight procedures. Instead, it had checked whether proposed structures would interfere with existing, published flight paths, work it said fell squarely within its Part 178 approval. The Director, on the other hand, argued that the company’s operating manual had been approved in error and should have required a Part 173 holder to sign off on that work.
The committee found that the regulations do not clearly define where obstacle assessment ends and flight procedure design begins. Crucially, the Director had originally approved the company’s manual and could not adequately explain why its contents were now unlawful. The committee could not identify, from the sample reports put before it, how the company had crossed into Part 173 work.
The committee did not say that SACAA lacks enforcement power. It accepted that the Director has broad authority to protect aviation safety, including requiring changes to an operator’s manual. The problem was the absence of a clear, reasoned explanation linking the company’s conduct to a specific legal breach. Without that, the enforcement action could not stand. The decision was set aside and sent back for a fresh determination.
This decision carries a clear message for both regulators and the aviation industry. Enforcement powers are not in doubt. The SACAA has broad authority to protect aviation safety. But authority without reasoned justification is not enough. A regulator that approves an operator’s manual and then penalises that operator for following it must articulate, with precision, which rule has been broken and why. Without that, enforcement action will not survive scrutiny. For developers, operators and approval holders, the practical imperative is equally plain: where related approvals share overlapping technical ground, the boundaries between them must be defined clearly enough that compliance is not a matter of guesswork.